After months of promising his Build Back Better spending agenda would be “fully paid for” and would even “cost zero dollars,” President Joe Biden is being hoisted by his own petard. The Congressional Budget Office is set to burst that bubble Friday with a budget score showing that the Biden agenda will add hundreds of billions to the national debt.
The biggest difference between the White House and CBO estimates is the former’s unreasonable claim that the IRS can raise an additional $400 billion if it is given $80 billion for additional enforcement. The CBO estimates that the IRS can find only $120 billion in extra revenue with that money.
The Biden administration is now scrambling to minimize the damage from this impending CBO score, which will prove Biden has been lying about his signature agenda item. The White House is reportedly telling wayward centrist Democrats that their estimate is more accurate. “In this one case, I think we’ve made a very strong empirical case for CBO not having an accurate score,” said Department of the Treasury assistant secretary Ben Harris.
But if it’s a question of credibility, the Biden administration has none left.
This same Biden administration that promised voters the surge of migrants at the southern border was “seasonal.” As record numbers of migrants keep pouring in from around the world, arrested at the southern border months after illegal migration usually ebbs, this appears to have been a lie.
This same Biden administration told voters in July that it was “highly unlikely” the Taliban would end up “overrunning everything and owning the whole country” of Afghanistan. One month later, Taliban troops seized Kabul, forcing the Biden administration to perform an unplanned, disorganized evacuation that left 13 American service members dead and billions in military equipment to the Taliban.
This is the same Biden administration that insisted the ongoing bout of inflation was “temporary” or even a positive sign that the economy was recovering. But, in October, as inflation hit a 30-year high and analysts predicted it would stay elevated through at least 2022, yet another Biden lie was laid bare. In fact, inflation is so bad that it has outpaced wage growth, meaning most people have gotten a functional pay cut since Biden was sworn into office.
After being proven so thoroughly wrong on immigration, Afghanistan, and inflation, why on Earth should anybody believe Biden about anything?
Centrist Democrats would be wise to take CBO’s word that Biden’s agenda adds to the debt and reject the invitation to pour more deficit spending gasoline on the existing inflation fire.
The real deficit impact of the Biden agenda would actually be much worse than the CBO score will show, but this is not the CBO’s fault. The CBO can only score the legislation that is put in front of them, even if that legislation includes 10 years of tax hikes purporting to pay for just three or four years’ worth of spending. And that is exactly what congressional Democrats have done with Biden’s agenda.
For the sole purpose of misleading voters about the true cost of the spending plans, Democrats have deliberately cut spending authorizations years short for many of the programs in the bill. For example, instead of increasing payments to parents for 10 years at a cost of $1.13 trillion, the Democrats have increased payments for just one year, thus knocking off $1 trillion from the final price tag on paper, all the while planning to spend the money in those other nine years.
Two independent budget scorekeepers, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget and the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, have provided true 10-year cost estimates of Biden’s spending bill. Both found that if Democrats had been honest when they drafted their agenda, the true cost would be around $4.1-$4.2 trillion, not the $1.75 trillion they claim. The CBO should do everyone a favor and release two scores: one score of the bill as written and a second score reflecting the true 10-year cost of each spending program.
According to the latest Harvard University poll, a majority of people already believe that Biden’s $1.75 trillion spending plan will lead to more inflation. When they learn the real price tag is closer to $4 trillion, that number will only go up. And any Democrat who votes for this boondoggle will own the resulting inflation for many elections to come.
