This fiscal year’s budget deficit shrunk in half from last year, but the red ink soared on a monthly basis in September largely because of President Joe Biden’s plans to forgive student debt, as three decades’ worth of costs were compressed into a single month.
The budget figures released Friday by the Treasury Department reveal dueling visions about what it means to be financially responsible: Biden can rightly claim that the budget deficit for fiscal 2022 plunged $1.4 trillion from the prior year; critics can use the same report to say that forgiving education loans pushed up the federal debt by roughly $400 billion as the government booked the full expense.
Buried in the numbers is a deeper battle between Democrats and Republicans about what it means to be good financial stewards. The federal budget deficit totaled $1.38 trillion this year. That’s down from $2.78 trillion in fiscal 2021 —and it’s a message that Biden wants to sell to voters going into the midterm…
