MOSCOW: The US budget deficit during Joe Biden’s presidency has reached an all-time high of $6.6 trillion, according to Sputnik calculations based on data from the US Treasury Department.
US government spending exceeded revenues by $6.6 trillion during the three and a half years of Biden’s administration – the highest figure in the entire history of this statistic. Thus, in 2021, the indicator amounted to $2.8 trillion, or 13 percent of GDP. The following year, the negative balance narrowed to $1.4 trillion, or 6.3 percent of GDP, but last year it increased to $1.7 trillion, or 7.6 percent of GDP. In the first six months of this year, it amounted to $758.2 billion, and the share of GDP on a rolling annual basis was 5.5 percent.
His predecessor, Donald Trump, accumulated a total deficit of $5.6 trillion. At the same time, under Trump, in the peak Corona year of 2020, there was a maximum annual negative budget balance of $3.1 trillion, or 15.5 percent of GDP.
Barack Obama was the only American leader this century to reduce the US budget deficit from $5.1 trillion under George W. Bush to $2.2 trillion by the end of his presidency. However, Bush was the last president under whom the US budget recorded an annual surplus of $130 billion in 2001.
The United States has experienced chronic excess spending relative to revenue for nearly a century; the last extended period of surpluses occurred from 1920 to 1930.
The only U.S. president after World War II to have a budget surplus was Harry Truman (1946-1950). The largest government spending surplus was recorded by the Ronald Reagan administration, which amounted to $1.34 trillion.
The US is financing such a gigantic budget deficit from the national debt, which exceeded the $35 trillion mark for the first time in July and rose by another $160 billion just two weeks later. – Bernama, Sputnik
