Biden In Twilight

That Joe Biden is long gone in senility is obvious to everyone. True, not everyone will admit it: in the longer version of the CNN interview that Lloyd Billingsley wrote about earlier, Hillary Clinton fulsomely praised Biden’s extraordinary record of accomplishment. I suppose she thought the CNN audience might buy it.

It is not necessary to trace Biden’s decline on a daily basis, but today’s episode is worth noting. Biden exhibited a complete failure to understand the basics of the federal budget and the federal debt.

He began by blaming the public’s belief that our economy is performing poorly on the press, which he regards as hostile to him. He unleashed this metaphor:

“You turn on the television and there’s not a whole lot about ‘Boy saves dog as he swims in the lake,’” he added. “It’s about ‘Somebody pushed the dog in the lake.’ I mean, I get it.”

He went on:

“I think that the American people are smart as hell and know what their interests are. I think they know they are better off financially than they were before. It’s a fact. And all that data, all that polling stuff shows they think they’re more positive about the economy than they’ve been.”

As the linked article notes, a recent poll “found that 77% of registered voters rate the economy as ‘not so good’ or ‘poor, while 23% say the economy is ‘excellent’ or ‘good.” What Biden can’t acknowledge is that the cost of living has risen 17% since he took office, devastating the budgets of all Americans of modest means. The fact that “inflation is slowing,” as the Democrats like to say, merely means that people are getting worse off, but not as rapidly as they were some months ago.

But I digress. Biden’s howlers related mainly to the federal budget:

“Those 50 corporations that made $40 billion and weren’t paying a penny in taxes? Well, guess what, we made them pay 30% — 15% in taxes, 15%, nowhere near what they should pay.

This makes no sense. If a corporation shows a profit of hundreds of millions or billions of dollars, it owes income taxes to the federal government. Payment is not optional. The idea that corporations weren’t going to pay their income taxes, but the Biden administration “made them pay,” is absurd. And for what it is worth, the federal corporate income tax rate is 21%, so I have no idea where Biden got either 30% or 15%.

But Biden was just getting warmed up:

And guess what? We’re able to pay for everything. And we end up with an actual surplus,” Biden said.

“I was able to cut the federal debt by $1.7 trillion over that first two and a half — two years,” Biden said at one point, confusing the terms “debt” and “deficit.”

The national debt has increased by nearly $6 trillion since Biden took office, from $27.75 trillion to about $33.48 trillion.

The facts are quite different from Biden’s fantasies:

Treasury Department data show that the deficit for the first 11 months of fiscal 2023 was about $1.52 trillion — 61% higher than it was at the same point one year prior and already exceeding all years of federal deficit spending except for 2020 and 2021, when the federal government shouldered much of the nation’s payroll during the [covid] outbreak.

The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget recently projected that the deficit for fiscal 2023 could hit $2 trillion, up from $1.38 trillion last year.

As far as I can tell, there is not a single member of the Democratic Party who minds that President Biden is mentally incompetent. Our nation is sliding into a fiscal abyss, and Democrats have no intention of doing anything about it, or even acknowledging the fact. My best guess is that they are simply hoping that when the collapse comes, we have a Republican president whom they can blame.