The President Who Won’t Negotiate
There’s at least one virtue of having
a president who has occupied senior federal office for all but four years of the last half century—and who supported massive government expansion even during the brief period when he was not occupying federal office. Joe Biden cannot reasonably blame predecessors for the federal debt pile that is now larger than the entire U.S. economy.
According to the Treasury,
more than 90% of U.S. government debt has accumulated since Mr. Biden joined the Senate in January of 1973. Over his decades in Congress and in the White House—and of course as the shutdown candidate of 2020—Mr. Biden has been a consistent advocate for higher federal spending.
Can you name anyone who bears more responsibility than our president for the staggering debt burden now being imposed upon America’s children? Beyond Mr. Biden’s Senate body of work and his presidential spending blowout for a pandemic emergency that had already ended, there are also the specific policies on student loans that recently accelerated the speed at which Washington collided with the statutory debt limit.
Now the president wants to rewrite the law to increase this debt limit but he currently lacks the necessary votes in either house of Congress. Normally when a president believes a change in law is necessary but faces opposition among the people’s representatives, he undertakes what is called a negotiation.
But Mr. Biden refuses and insists that lawmakers must allow federal debt to continue to rise without any reform of federal spending.
Consistent with his Beltway history, he seems to be making no effort at all to restore sound fiscal policy. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget notes today:
Press reports indicate that President Biden’s Fiscal Year 2024 budget will be submitted this March,
well after the statutory deadline of the first Monday in February. This is the third year in a row that the President has missed the budget submission deadline, and it likely means that the rest of the Congressional budget process will be delayed.
Whenever the Biden budget arrives, don’t expect it to include sensible spending restraints.
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