It’s no secret that the United States’ debt is out of control. It currently sits at over $32 trillion and is expected to reach $100 trillion within thirty years. Interest payments alone cost the U.S. $475 billion since 2022, the highest interest payments ever recorded. Left unchecked, the rising budget deficits will lead to even worse economic growth than the nation is currently experiencing and ever-expanding debt.
Many may not know that, just like consumers, the United States is subject to credit ratings, and when confidence in the ability to repay debts falls, so does the nation’s credit score. On the surface, the U.S. still has a good rating, currently at AA+. But the nation’s credit rating stood at AAA prior to Bidenomics and the current administration’s spending spree.
The Biden administration wasted no time in placing the blame at the Republicans’ door. And not just any Republicans are to blame. The “ultra-MAGA” Republicans and their refusal to play along with the administration’s spending packages are to blame.
Biden has been touting the “success” of what he and his party laughably call “Bidenomics,” falsely claiming that inflation is lowering and unemployment is down. These claims have repeatedly been fact-checked and found to be, if not entirely untrue, true only in a certain context.
And Fitch Ratings, one of three major credit agencies, doesn’t care about context. In a signal intended to tell lenders that the nation’s ability to repay interest is questionable, the agency reduced the United States’ rating from “extremely strong capacity to meet financial commitments” to a “very strong” capacity.
It is only the second time in the nation’s history that a major credit agency has downgraded the country’s score. The last time was in 2011 under then-president Barack Obama’s watch. Obama, coincidentally, was a Democratic leader who believed in unchecked spending. The last economic crisis was under Obama as well.
In other words, the last two terms served by a Democratic president have resulted in unchecked spending, record national debt, lowered national credit score, and economic hardship for the entire nation.
The administration claims to be “puzzled” by Fitch’s downgrade, a move that “defies reality” and “is absurd” because, as White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre explained, “President Biden has delivered the strongest recovery of any major economy in the world.” She went on to claim that Republicans were to blame because of “cheer-leading” default and “undermining governance and democracy.”
In an even bigger stretch, the Biden campaign links the downgrade to former president Trump, even going so far as to call it a “Trump downgrade.”
Biden campaign spokesman Kevin Munoz said that the “Trump downgrade” is a direct result of the extreme MAGA Republican agendas, “defined by chaos, callousness, and recklessness that Americans continue to reject.” He claimed, “Donald Trump oversaw the loss of millions of American jobs and ballooned the deficit with the disastrous tax cuts for the wealthy and big corporations.”
But Trump urged GOP leadership to propose tighter spending cuts on the debt ceiling standoff, even if it meant risking default. And the downgrade proves that, once again, Trump was correct.
The dent ceiling deal didn’t go far enough, and the cuts were one-sided and almost uniformly opposed by Democrats. A senior Republican aide explained that only Republicans attempted to balance the budget and that Democrats had to be dragged “kicking and screaming” to negotiations.
Chuck Schumer tweeted that the downgrade showed that the GOP’s “reckless flirtation” with default and Republican “brinksmanship” was to blame. Critics immediately pointed out that the downgrade meant the exact opposite and that Congress didn’t enact enough deficit reduction.
In fact, Fitch explains the downgrade as resulting from repeated debt-limit standoffs and last-minute resolutions that did little to solve the problem of the enormous debt facing the nation.
In September, Congress faces another showdown over funding with yet another threat of a government shutdown. It’s unclear what the Republican strategy will be entering this next round of negotiations, but it’s generally expected that the GOP will prepare legislation with even harder bottom lines than June’s negotiations.
In fact, some believe that the more conservative party members might be looking at a government shit down to prove their point and stop the Biden spending train. But this train is off the rails, the engineer is drunk on power and greed, and, for the media, Trump’s indictments are far juicier than boring talk about credit ratings.
Expect to hear little nothing about this from the mainstream media until Trump’s indictments run out of steam, a government shutdown is looming, and once again, fingers can be pointed at Republicans in the face of catastrophic Democratic economic failure.
