(UnitedVoice.com) – President Joe Biden says Americans are better off under his high-tax, high-spending administration. Conservatives disagree and say we were better off with former President Donald Trump’s tax-cutting policies. Now the dispute has spilled over onto Fox News, as two of the network’s top personalities go head to head over economics.
Kellyanne Conway, Juan Williams Get Into Heated Debate Over Biden, Trump https://t.co/MBWnGAXWop
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) February 9, 2023
On February 8, Fox’s senior political analyst Juan Williams jumped to the defense of the administration’s optimistically named Inflation Reduction Act, telling colleague Kellyanne Conway that Biden has “cut the deficit hugely… more, I think, than any other president.” Williams insisted that a quarter of the US deficit was caused by Trump, and claimed that Trump’s “tax cuts for the very rich” were “actual spending.”
Williams obviously thought he was proving a point about Trump, but in fact what he was proving is that he doesn’t know much about economics. Specifically, he doesn’t seem to understand the difference between the national debt and the deficit. The national debt is the total amount of money the US owes. At the end of the 2020 fiscal year, just three months before Biden took office, the national debt was $27.75 trillion. At the end of FY 2022, after nearly two years of Biden, it was $30.8 trillion, so he clearly hasn’t cut that. The deficit, on the other hand, is the difference between how much the government raises in taxes and how much it spends. Under Trump the annual deficit averaged $1.39 trillion. Under Biden it’s averaged $2.073 trillion so far —so he hasn’t cut that either.
Former Trump campaign manager and senior counselor to the president Conway, who does understand economics, hit back at Williams, pointing out that Trump didn’t just give tax cuts to the very rich; she reminded him that “Everybody got a tax cut under President Trump” — and those tax cuts encouraged Americans to repatriate trillions of dollars from overseas banks and put it back into the US economy. Finally, she hit him with devastating figures on how many Americans think they’re better off under Biden. That number is just 16%, compared to 41% who disagree. Williams might be convinced he’s right, but he’s part of the 16% on this one.
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