# The U.S. government is still going bankrupt

When President Joe Biden took office, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that the federal government was on pace to run a $12.1 trillion deficit over the following 10 years.

https://reason.com/video/2022/08/18/the-inflation-reduction-act-barely-puts-a-dent-in-the-deficit/

But thanks to a boatload of new spending passed by Congress and signed by Biden during his first 16 months in the White House, that figure has climbed to about $14.5 trillion. In short, Biden has overseen a $2.4 trillion increase in America's long-term budget deficit.

One way or another, that shortfall has to be accounted for by cutting spending, raising taxes, or printing money. So what does the new Inflation Reduction Act do to address the problem?

It doesn't cut unnecessary spending or wasteful government programs. Instead, it raises taxes. And those tax increases will only reduce the deficit by about $300 billion. That's just 2 percent of what the government is forecasted to borrow over the decade after Biden took office.

In other words, even if you assume Congress won't further hike spending, we'd still need about 50 more bills just like the Inflation Reduction Act to avoid adding more debt in the next decade. And that doesn't even address the $30 trillion in debt the country has already accumulated.

Even that small deficit reduction requires a massive corporate tax increase that will hurt the economy. There's also a plan to squeeze more money out of taxpayers by hiring 87,000 new…

- Kind: Short
- Year: 2022
- Runtime: 1 min
- By: ReasonTV
- Archive: [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_U.S._government_is_still_going_bankrupt.webm)
- Licence or status: [CC BY 3.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0) (as the archive states it)
- Credit: ReasonTV
- Who can watch: Teens profiles and older (the archive gives no rating; placed by Invisible Network from its collection and subjects)

[Watch now](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/watch/archive/commons/145597549?play=1)