As the showdown over raising the nation’s debt ceiling drags on, lawmakers have spun up an array of deceptive statistics to blame their political opponents.
Republicans have misleadingly minimized their party’s own contributions and wrongly suggested that Democrats and President Biden are solely to blame. For their part, Democrats have overstated former President Donald J. Trump’s role in reaching the debt limit.
Here’s a fact check.
WHAT WAS SAID
“If you look at the last four years, the Democrats have increased spending by 30 percent, $400 billion. We’re at 120 percent of G.D.P. We haven’t been in this place to debt since World War II.”
— Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Republican of California, in a Jan. 29 appearance on CBS
This is misleading. It is true that discretionary spending — which is generally subject to congressional authorization each year, compared with mandatory spending levels set by other laws — increased by roughly 30 percent over the last four years. But that includes two years when Mr. Trump was president and Republicans controlled the Senate, so it is unreasonable to claim that Democrats were solely responsible for the spending increases incurred in those four years.
