President Biden is Undoing Trump's Fiscal Mismanagement and Aiming for a Balanced Budget

     Donald Trump, with the exception of his corporate tax cuts, built his presidency on a lie. In his inaugural address, he pledged to rebuild America's roads and bridges, balance the budget, and build a new healthcare system, none of which occurred. In November 2021, President Biden delivered what Trump talked about one week each year for four years and secured a $550 billion boost to American manufacturing, the most comprehensive investment in America's infrastructure ever and the largest since Eisenhower was in the White House. 

     Now, it's up to President Biden to get to work on the second of those three issues. President Biden often gets called a deficit spender, but the fact is that the opposite has proven true. The American Rescue Plan Act, Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, Honoring Our PACT Act, and Bipartisan Innovation Act, if and when the final two are passed, should increase spending by a combined total of roughly $3.1 trillion dollars. With the confirmation of Ketanji Brown Jackson done, Congress is now working on passing the Build Back Better Framework, one that can get 50 votes. The estimated cost of this bill or bills will be $1.9 trillion and will bring the total to $5 trillion.

     However, in his first two years in the White House, President Biden has been undoing Trump's fiscal mismanagement and aiming for a balanced budget. Between January 2021 and January 2023, the deficit is on track to fall by $1.85 trillion, the largest decrease ever; President Biden has shown no indication that he intends to stop in 2023 and 2024, and this historic 65 percent deficit decrease will ease inflation while putting the United States on track to balance its budget by 2026. If a balanced budget can be achieved, the total estimated savings would be $2.5 trillion. If and when it is passed, the Build Back Better Agenda will raise taxes on the wealthy and corporations by at least $2 trillion. President Biden signed the Postal Service Reform Act, which decreased the financial burden on the U.S. Postal Service by $50 billion, and the proposed Social Security Fairness Act will have a similar impact. 

     These bills, combined with the proposed cancellation of student debt, will lead to the creation of millions of jobs and create trillions of dollars in spending that will generate hundreds of billions of dollars in tax revenue. That should be enough to cancel out the remaining $400 billion or so in increased spending. 

     These next few months will be crucial ones in American history. We can build on ARPA and IIJA by restoring Made-In-America and manufacturing, securing supply chains, fighting inflation, competing with China, leading with science, protecting our wildlife and wilderness areas, lifting the undue burden placed by college costs, securing universal childcare, making the largest housing investment in U.S. history, honoring our veterans, tackling the threat posed by climate change, expanding and securing Social Security benefits into the future, lowering the cost of healthcare and medications, eliminating child poverty, fighting hunger at home and abroad, and so much more, and we can do it all without raising taxes on the middle class and still achieve a balanced budget. We are within reach of building back better; we just have to buckle down and demand the Senate act.