President Joe Biden, a Democrat, was widely mocked over the weekend after he posted a tweet in which he bragged about how the United States pays its bills on time by taking on more debt.
“The United States pays its debts when they are due,” Biden wrote in a tweet that also featured a video. “That’s why today, I signed a bill to fast-track the process to raise our debt limit.”
“This bill will reassure all the economic markets at home and around the world that we’re going to continue to pay our debts when they are due,” Biden says in the video as he signs the bill. “And that’s what this is all about.”
The United States pays its debts when they are due. That’s why today, I signed a bill to fast-track the process to raise our debt limit. pic.twitter.com/Rx4MNC1XS9
— President Biden (@POTUS) December 11, 2021
The following are some of the most notable responses to Biden’s remarks:
- Geoffrey Miller, professor: “The US pays off its existing credit card bills by using new credit cards with higher spending limits. Totally unsustainable.”
- Nick Searcy, actor: “This is like paying off credit card debt by transferring your balance to another card with a higher interest rate and a higher limit. The children tweeting for @joebiden are like college kids over drafting their accounts and paying it back with money from their parents.”
- Sean Davis, The Federalist: “This is the equivalent of patting yourself on the back for getting a new, higher interest rate credit card to pay down another credit card balance.”
- Corin Nemec, political commentator: “It’s an oxymoron without the oxy.”
- Tim Pool, YouTuber: “I remember when my parents had to use credit cards to pay bills too.”
- Ryan Bethencourt, CEO: “Literally one of the strangest tweets I’ve ever seen, we (the US) pay our debts with debt, I wonder what the endgame is here? $ Devaluation?”
- Natalie Brunell, Bitcoin analyst: “We just paid our Visa with our MasterCard.”
- Peter McCormack, political commentator: “Wait wut? You are literally putting this debt on the American people you f***ing melt.”
- Litquidity: “The United States pays its debts when they are due by raising the debt ceiling to take on even more debt and ‘printing’ more money out of thin air.”
- Tyler Winklevoss: “The United States pays its debts when they are due…by robbing Peter to pay Paul.”
- Anurag Dixit, political commentator: “And he says inflation has peaked.”
- Mark Jeffrey, crypto analyst: “Yes. We pay our debts by incurring new, larger debts (raising the debt limit — letting us borrow even more). That’s like drinking more to stop drinking.”
- Alasdair Macleod, financial researcher: “In this clip @POTUS is exposed as completely bonkers. Anyone who thinks leaders like him are planning a global reset should think again. They are all so clueless they can’t even find their way out of a paper bag!”
- Per Bylund, professor: “I’m sure whoever wrote this tweet thinks its two sentences are intuitively, logically, and obviously connected. Somehow.”
- Joseph Mallozzi, writer: “Wait, wut? Has this account been hacked?”