President Joe Biden said Republicans are ‘fiscally demented’ while speaking at a Martin Luther King Day event Monday, amid GOP calls for more transparency regarding the president’s mishandling of classified documents.
The president began by claiming Democrats are fiscally responsible, before taking a jab at Republicans who criticized his administrations spending.
‘You’re gonna talk about big spending Democrats again,’ Biden said during a speech at the National Action Network’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Day breakfast, referring to Republicans who frequently called out the president for signing massive spending bills into law in the midst of a recession.
‘Guess what,’ the president whispered into his microphone, ‘I reduced the deficit last year three hundred and fifty billion dollars.’
‘These guys, they’re fiscally demented. They don’t quite get it,’ Biden said drawing laughs from the crowd, before quickly returning to the teleprompter and reading the rest of his speech.
Biden continued to tout his trillion dollar spending packages throughout the speech, meanwhile inflation hit a 40-year-high of 9.1% in June and gas prices soared nationwide under his watch.
In November, the Biden administration claimed that they were responsible for the historical reduction in the federal deficit, leaving out other major contributing factors that led to the decrease.
‘The Biden-Harris Administration lowered the deficit with the single largest one-year reduction in American history,’ the White House tweeted.
Twitter users quickly pointed out that despite the reduction, ‘the FY22 deficit is still the 4th largest in history and is 41% larger than FY19’ and highlighted that high COVID-driven deficits played a significant role in the drop.
Biden’s comment comes just days after several batches of classified documents were found at both his Penn Biden Center office and Delaware home, a recovery that sparked major backlash from the GOP after the president had called former President Trump ‘irresponsible’ for holding onto classified materials after leaving office.