Biden repeats ‘misleading’ claim he cut America’s budget deficit by $1.7 trillion: ‘Bottomless Pinocchios’
Fox News
President Biden is off to repeating – once again – what has been labeled a “highly misleading” claim about the federal budget deficit.
During a Thursday speech in West Columbia, South Carolina touting what he says is the success of his administration’s economic policies, Biden claimed he had reduced the federal government’s budget deficit by $1.7 trillion since taking office in January 2021.
“And by the way, parenthetically, I want you to hear about the deficit. I cut the deficit $1.7 trillion in two years. Nobody’s ever done that – cut the debt $1.7 [trillion],” Biden told the crowd gathered at manufacturing company Flex LTD.
Biden has made the same claim on numerous occasions and, in April, earned a “Bottomless Pinocchio” rating for it from The Washington Post’s liberal chief fact-checker, Glenn Kessler.
Kessler, who called the claim “highly misleading,” previously gave Biden “three Pinocchios” when he made a different version of the claim in September of last year.
“He keeps saying it over and over,” Kessler wrote in April. “By our count, at least 30 times since June he’s taken credit for reducing the budget deficit by $1.7 trillion.”
Kessler wrote that the additional pandemic relief funds enacted by Biden, as well as other new policies, caused a “more modest decline in the deficit” than was projected for 2021 and 2022.
“All told, in those two years Biden increased the national debt about $850 billion more than originally projected,” he said.
“In other words, again the data shows the deficit picture has worsened under Biden,” he added.
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In May, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) revealed that the federal government under Biden had run a near-$1 trillion federal deficit in the “first seven months of fiscal year 2023.” It found that in those months alone, the federal government had racked up $928,000,000,000.
Fox News’ Joseph A. Wulfsohn and Houston Keene contributed to this report.