Vice President JD Vance said Thursday that the Trump administration was handed a massive fiscal problem by the Biden administration, describing it as a “debt bomb” while arguing that President Donald Trump’s economic team has a strategy to make U.S. economic growth outpace the growth of the national debt.
Vance made the remarks during an appearance on Newsmax’s “Carl Higbie FRONTLINE,” where host Carl Higbie questioned him about the administration’s approach to the national debt, which recently surpassed $40 trillion.
“There’s a weird way where American taxpayers are getting fleeced because of the very high debt charges,” Vance said.
Vance said the high cost of servicing the federal debt largely took shape during the Biden administration and maintained that the Trump administration has already begun improving the situation.
“By the way, very high debt charges that started under the Biden administration. This is a crisis that we inherited, and I think has gotten better.”
According to Vance, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is pursuing a “very discreet plan,” with Trump’s support, aimed at expanding the economy at a faster rate than the country’s debt burden is growing.
“And if you look, we are on track. So even though the debt is too high, even though we inherited this debt bomb from the Biden administration, we actually do have a plan to get the economy growing faster than the debt. And that’s the most important thing,” Vance said.
Vance argued that the central problem during the Biden years was not simply the size of the debt, but the fact that borrowing was increasing at a faster pace than the overall economy.
“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 [gross domestic product]. That’s the problem.”
Both the Trump and Biden administrations, however, enacted policies that contributed trillions of dollars to projected federal borrowing.
A 2024 analysis by the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimated that policies approved during Trump’s first term would add approximately $8.4 trillion in borrowing over a 10-year period. Policies approved during Biden’s first three years and five months in office were projected to add approximately $4.3 trillion over the same time horizon.
When major COVID-19 relief measures were removed from the calculations, the CRFB estimated that Trump-approved policies would account for roughly $4.8 trillion in additional 10-year borrowing, compared with approximately $2.2 trillion resulting from policies approved under Biden.
The organization also cautioned against simply attributing increases in the national debt during a president’s tenure directly to that president. Federal borrowing can be driven by previously enacted laws, changing economic conditions and other circumstances beyond a president’s direct control.
Vance nevertheless said the current administration recognizes the seriousness of the debt problem and that Bessent has Trump’s full support in attempting to address it.
“That’s something that we’re certainly fixing every single day in the Trump administration. Scott Bessent is very much on top of it,” he said.
“He knows it’s a problem, and he’s got the president’s empowerment to do something about it.”
{Matzav.com}
