You Cannot Blame the Debt Crisis on Joe Biden

Kevin D. Williamson

 by Kevin D. Williamson, The Dispatch, Aug. 24, 2026 - “We inherited this debt bomb from the Biden administration,” J.D. Vance, vice president and knee-walking sycophant, insisted during an appearance on a Newsmax program where someone called Carl Higbie pretends to be a journalist. “American taxpayers are getting fleeced because of the very high debt charges … very high debt charges that started under the Biden administration. This is a crisis that we inherited. … The issue that we’ve had under the Biden administration and what we’re still kind of dealing with is that the debt was growing faster than American GDP.” 

.... The economy in fact grew more quickly than the debt did during Biden’s term in office: When Joe Biden entered office (Q1 2021), debt was 124 percent of GDP; when Biden left office (Q1 2025), debt was down to 121 percent of GDP. Joe Biden had more cause than Donald Trump has to make Vance’s kind of complaint about his successor: When Donald Trump first entered office (Q1 2017), debt was only 103 percent of GDP; by Q2 2020, debt was 133 percent of GDP, and while debt pressure eased somewhat in the COVID recovery, it was 124 percent of GDP when Trump left office. But even before the dramatic COVID spike, debt-to-GDP was headed the wrong way during the first Trump administration. And it is headed the wrong way now: Debt was 121 percent of GDP when Trump took office the second time around and is about 126 percent today according to the latest estimates. Some of those numbers can be blamed on COVID, but much of it is just the usual stupid spending and cowardly tax policy. 

Vance’s argument is, of course, dishonest: This is J.D. Vance we are talking about—of course it is dishonest. Vance is a man without integrity who serves men who hold honesty and honor in contempt, and he is nothing if not servile when it comes to his masters. But Vance’s argument is also a stupid one, which maybe also should go without saying. American pundits’ and partisans’ favorite party game is pin-the-debt-on-the-president, but the power to collect taxes, appropriate spending, and borrow money belongs to Congress, not to the president. Republican members of Congress voted for a great deal of spending while Biden was president. They had voted for a great deal of spending, and for tax cuts, during the first Trump administration, too. And then Republicans put together a gigantic—and gigantically irresponsible—spending package in the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill, for which not one single solitary Democrat in Congress cast a vote. The Trump bill added as much as $4.7 trillion to the debt through spending, through tax cuts, and, according to analysts at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, by contributing to higher interest rates on U.S. government debt—i.e., it is one cause of those “very high debt changes” that Vance is caterwauling about. 

The Democrats have been no great shakes when it comes to fiscal probity. But to try to pretend that our current fiscal situation—entitlement and discretionary spending, the tax code, interest rates—is the result of Democratic actions taken during the Biden administration is beyond dishonest.

Kevin D. Williamson is national correspondent at The Dispatch and is based in Virginia. Prior to joining the company in 2022, he spent 15 years as a writer and editor at National Review, worked as the theater critic at the New Criterion, and had a long career in local newspapers. He is also a writer in residence at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

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