Biden responsible for trip to the debt ceiling

 Liz Peek:

In just two years of Joe Biden’s presidency, our national debt has grown by $3.8 trillion. Beginning in 1929, it took the U.S. Treasury 61 years to accumulate that much borrowing.

Yet Biden has the temerity to call Republicans “fiscally demented.”

The fight over raising the debt ceiling is just beginning, and already the embattled president is insulting those who oppose his reckless spending, which is, as I write this, crashing our economy. It will get worse — the downturn and the name-calling.

President Biden tossed trillions in unnecessary COVID-19 relief onto a fast-recovering economy, punching up inflation to 40-year highs as too many dollars chased too few goods.

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget reckons Biden has added $4.8 trillion to our deficits through executive actions and legislation. This is in addition to our normal spending.

Meanwhile, no one – including many Republicans – has been minding the store.

Now we see the beginning of the recession that the Federal Reserve deems necessary to drive down inflation. Retail sales, housing and manufacturing have turned down. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell has said unemployment must go up and growth must go down in order to reach the central bank’s 2 percent official inflation target.

We are, in effect, about to pay for Joe Biden’s largesse — with people losing their jobs and businesses going under. When our nation’s biggest banks set aside billions to cover expected loan losses, as they just did at the end of the year, it is because they expect companies to default on loans and people to get into trouble financially. This is not an act of God; this is because our leaders spent too much money.

Republicans in the House, now in the majority, want to slow spending. To elect Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) Speaker, a group of conservatives demanded that he deliver a plan to balance the budget in the next 10 years, and also promise to pair any increase in the debt ceiling with spending cuts.  

The Biden White House is aghast. They want the debt ceiling increased with no concessions and, as spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre has announced, they will not negotiate on the matter. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen announced last week that we would soon reach the debt cap of $31.4 trillion ($247,000 per taxpayer), causing her department to undertake “extraordinary measures” to keep the federal lights on.

That moment has arrived. Her maneuvering will keep Treasury borrowings below the lid until sometime in June, at which point the government will not be able to borrow more funds.

Prepare for a massive public relations fight. Biden and his Democratic colleagues are already portraying GOP House members as rabble rousers and agents of chaos — ready to sabotage our economy, torch markets and bring on a financial crisis. The liberal media will broadcast that Social Security payments will cease and veterans will go hungry.

But Democrats do not occupy the high ground here. Even as inflation soared under their watch, they kept spending. Total U.S. debt has jumped to 100 percent of GDP, up from 39 percent in 2008. Higher interest rates and expanding deficits mean that payments on our debt are set to surpass defense and Medicaid spending in just a few years, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Meanwhile, in the just-concluded first fiscal quarter of 2023, interest payments on our debt shot up 37 percent and the deficit widened by 12 percent — sobering news indeed.
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There is more.

The reckless spending of Biden and the Democrats in Congress have brought us to this point and Biden and his followers do not want to change course on their trip to the next debt ceiling.  The Republicans will need to withstand the threats of the Dems to rein in the big spending.  They should go on the offensive and tag the Democrats who created this fiasco.