Debt level is 100 percent of GDP, the highest since World War II

In the presidential election campaign, politicians are once again turning into pandering game show hosts, promising their voters huge tax cuts and spending increases, with no regard for the debt crisis that these policies will only accelerate.

Despite relative peace and prosperity, budget deficits are expected to exceed $2 trillion this year and, under current policies, rise to $4 trillion within a decade.

For the first time since the end of World War II, national debt will exceed 100 percent of gross domestic product.

The impending end of Biden and Harris’s terms in office provides an opportunity to assess their role in these growing deficits.

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have undoubtedly inherited an economic and fiscal mess. President Donald Trump had already signed legislation and executive orders that increased decade-long budget deficits by $4 trillion before the bipartisan response to the pandemic added another $4 trillion.

PEast Pandemic Toll

When Biden and Harris took office, the pandemic-ravaged economy was finally getting back on track and Americans were returning to work. For example, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) predicted that budget deficits – which had temporarily risen to $3 trillion – would fall back to pre-pandemic levels of $1 trillion after pandemic aid expired.

Instead, the administration promptly ignored the advice of even liberal economists and pushed through President Biden's $1.9 trillion rescue plan for the United States.

Since the CBO had calculated that the recovering economy was only $420 billion short of capacity, this $1.9 trillion bazooka far missed its intended purpose as an economic stimulus.

As a result, the excessive stimulus – just as economists had warned – caused the economy to overheat and added another three percentage points to inflation, which had already risen due to previous pandemic-related stimulus and supply constraints.

Overall, this inflation cost average families more than $10,000.

Moreover, the individual items in the American Rescue Plan were largely unnecessary. The Democrats' piled-up wish list included $350 billion to fix state budget deficits that didn't actually exist, a bloated bailout of union pensions, and a decade's worth of additional federal funding for schools – all of which was sold to the public as extra unemployment benefits, tax credits, and child tax credits.

$28.2 trillion in debt

The Biden-Harris administration's spending spree didn't end there, however. It also passed $1.4 trillion in new spending in the form of omnibus appropriations bills, $620 billion in student loan bailouts, $520 billion in new veterans benefits, a $440 billion infrastructure bill, a semiconductor bill, and $360 billion in new SNAP and health care spending passed by executive order.

The offsetting savings promised in the Inflation Reduction Act and the Fiscal Responsibility Act are unlikely to materialize.

Adding all of this up and including the resulting interest costs, the total new costs imposed under President Biden over the next ten years will be over $5 trillion.

And that inflated number would have been even higher if the Supreme Court had not blocked an even larger student loan bailout package and if the Democratic Congress had not reached its breaking point and blocked the original $2.3 trillion Build Back Better proposal.

Almost all of the spending occurred in the first two years of the Biden-Harris administration, before inflation-weary voters intervened in their own way and elected a Republican House of Representatives in late 2022.

Instead of the budget deficit rising back to $1 trillion after the pandemic as the CBO had predicted, Biden and Harris' spending pushed the deficit back up to $2.8 trillion in 2021 and to about $2 trillion this year.

The results are shocking:

• The CBO's projected deficit for the full 2021-2031 period has increased from $14.5 trillion to $21.3 trillion—an additional deficit of $6.8 trillion.
• Federal spending (24 percent of GDP) and the budget deficit (7.5 percent of GDP) last year were the highest in American history, except for wars and recessions.
• US debt is expected to reach $28.2 trillion this year, equivalent to 100 percent of GDP – the highest level since the end of World War II.
• Since 2021, annual interest costs have nearly tripled, from $352 billion to nearly $1 trillion.
• The national debt currently stands at $212,600 per household.

BGas lighting in a hot house

Instead of taking responsibility for these red numbers, the White House has driven voters crazy by claiming that it has reduced budget deficits.

Biden boasts that his $2 trillion budget deficit is $1 trillion below the $3 trillion peak during the pandemic in 2020.

Of course, that 2020 figure was a one-time, pandemic-related anomaly, preceded by $1 trillion in deficits, and was expected to resume once the economy reopened and pandemic aid ran out.

Essentially, the president is treating the previously planned expiration of temporary pandemic spending as his own historic spending cut — and then spending the savings. This manipulation was dismissed by the Washington Post's fact-checkers with a rare rating of “Pinocchio without a bottom.”

Biden's successor will inherit $2 trillion in deficits, rising interest costs, and Social Security and Medicare trust funds on the verge of insolvency – a truly dismal fiscal record that is pushing Washington ever closer to a debt crisis.

Brian Riedl is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Follow him on X @Brian_Riedl.