Officials with the White House intend to try and slash the federal budget deficit by a grand total of $3 trillion over the course of the next decade, a plan that comes to be just shy of the much-needed $20 trillion in budget cuts needed to actually balance the budget.
An anonymous senior White House official explained to the Associated Press earlier this week that the budget proposal coming from Old Uncle Joe, which is expected to be revealed late Thursday evening, will drop this deficit by just a fraction with cuts equating to $3 trillion over the course of the next 10 years should Washington legislators vote to approve the plan. The figure was later confirmed by a statement from White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre who stated that the proposal “shows the American people that we take this seriously.”
Previously, Biden has promised in his State of the Union Address that the budget proposal would lower the deficit by close to $2 trillion.
Another recent report coming from the Congressional Budget Office found that the federal government is expected to spend well over $80 trillion in outlays throughout 2024-2033 while pulling in $60 trillion in revenue over the course of the same time period, which means that the government is expected to pull in an additional $20 trillion in new deficits. The plan currently coming from Biden’s White House would only account for about 15% of the expected deficit.
“The ongoing deficits are the result of a mismatch between government spending and tax revenue,” expressed Erica York, a Tax Foundation Senior Economist, as part of the recent analysis. “While revenue and spending as a share of GDP will meet or exceed their historical averages, spending growth outpaces revenue growth, leading to persistent deficits. Growing costs for interest, health-care programs, and Social Security drive the relative rise in spending.”
Both House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and President Joe Biden are in the process of working on a way to drop spending in the wake of the debt ceiling, which is an arbitrary cap on the national debt set up by Congress, flew past the statutory limit of nearly $31.4 trillion recently. Every official has stated they will not even think about any sort of reform that touches medicare or social security, highlighting a number of questions as to whether any meaningful cuts to spending will be realistic since those two programs alone make up about 46% of the entire federal budget that was reported last fiscal year, as reported within data from the Treasury Department.
Historically, Biden has been vocal in his promise to not raise taxes against those individuals making less than $400,000 a year and indicated as part of his State of the Union address that he would cut down the deficit by raising taxes for large businesses and higher-income households. “I will pay for the ideas I’ve talked about tonight by making the wealthy and big corporations begin to pay their fair share,” he stated. “Big corporations aren’t just taking advantage of the tax code. They’re taking advantage of you.”
