[Politics] Assessing Political Spin in the Debt Ceiling Fight

[Douma]

Republicans have wrongly suggested that President Biden and his party are solely responsible for the situation, while Democrats have overstated former President Donald J. Trump’s role.

As the showdown over raising the nation’s debt ceiling drags on, lawmakers have spun up an array of deceptive statistics to blame their political opponents.

Republicans have misleadingly minimized their party’s own contributions and wrongly suggested that Democrats and President Biden are solely to blame. For their part, Democrats have overstated former President Donald J. Trump’s role in reaching the debt limit. This is misleading. It is true that discretionary spending which is generally subject to congressional authorization each year, compared with mandatory spending levels set by other laws increased by roughly 30 percent over the last four years. But that includes two years when Mr. Trump was president and Republicans controlled the Senate, so it is unreasonable to claim that Democrats were solely responsible for the spending increases incurred in those four years. 

Democrats won a majority in the House in the 2018 midterm elections, but Republicans retained a majority in the Senate. Under a divided Congress and with Mr. Trump in the White House, discretionary spending totaled $1.3 trillion in the 2019 fiscal year, which ended in September 2019. That figure increased by $400 billion to an estimated $1.7 trillion in the 2022 fiscal year.

It is also worth noting that the 2019 fiscal year is the last year before the coronavirus pandemic took hold, spurring both Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden as well as Congress to approve sweeping stimulus packages that added heavily to the government’s tab. In the 2020 fiscal year, under a Republican president and Senate, discretionary spending reached $1.6 trillion. The first Covid-19 stimulus bill, which Mr. McCarthy voted for and which was enacted in March 2020, included nearly $300 billion in discretionary spending through the 2022 fiscal year. Mr. McCarthy’s claim that the national debt has exceeded gross domestic product by 20 percent for the first time in 80 years is also inaccurate. At the end of 2021, the national debt was at 121 percent of G.D.P. But that is actually a decrease from 2020, the last year of Mr. Trump’s presidency, when it had reached 127 percent.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2023/02/01/us/politics/debt-ceiling-fact-check.amp.html