President Joe Biden is struggling to find the votes to pass his ambitious, multitrillion-dollar climate change and welfare spending agenda, optimistically dubbed the “Build Back Better” plan. In an effort to get centrist Democrats in Congress on board, he has pared back the plan to “just” $2.4 trillion in spending (which is still nearly $17,000 per federal taxpayer). Or has he?
A new analysis from the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget finds that the real cost of Biden’s “pared back” plan could be more than double the $2.4 trillion advertised. The committee concludes that it could ultimately cost as much as $4.9 trillion, which is roughly $34,200 per federal taxpayer.
Why? Well, the Democrats have used budget gimmicks to get the official price tag down, listing many of the expenditures as “temporary” while openly stating their intentions to make them permanent later.
“They want to spend $2.4 trillion and buy with that almost $5 trillion worth of stuff,” CRFB Vice President Marc Goldwein said. “So the way they’re doing that is by making a number of the policies temporary.”
?NEW ANALYSIS? #BuildBackBetter Cost? Would Double with Extensions.
Our analysis explains why BBB relies on a substantial amount of short-term policies and arbitrary sunsets to reduce its cost.
Read it here: https://t.co/HXGtwpaTeS pic.twitter.com/ubYFAZpYJ3
— CRFB.org (@BudgetHawks) November 15, 2021
For example, the bill ostensibly authorizes an increase in the child tax credit for one year, which would cost $130 billion. Yet Democrats have openly stated that they want to make this permanent, and once people start getting checks, it is very, very rare for Congress to ever take them away. If the increase is ultimately made permanent, it would cost an additional $1 trillion!
This example perfectly shows how “temporary” authorizations allow the Biden administration to exploit budget gimmicks and artificially lower the price tag on the legislation.
A @BudgetHawks analysis shows just how much more expensive the #BuildBackBetter Act will really be when its “temporary” provisions, only temporary as a budget gimmick, are inevitably made permanent. pic.twitter.com/ypUHYcCRMW
— Brad Polumbo ??⚽️ ?️? (@brad_polumbo) November 17, 2021
The CRFB analysis also undercuts one of Biden’s other central claims about “Build Back Better”: that his spending plans won’t add to the national debt.
“As written, we estimate the Build Back Better Act would increase deficits by … a total of $200 billion through 2031,” CRFB concludes. “ If the legislation were made permanent without additional offsets, it would add nearly $1.5 trillion to deficits over five years and increase deficits by $3 trillion through 2031.”
That’s right: It could add trillions to the national debt — a far cry from the president’s repeated claims of deficit neutrality. And it’s not as if the committee’s analysis is an outlier. Similar analysis by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office also found that the spending plans will add to the national debt, contra Biden’s narrative.
It might all sound a bit wonky, but this isn’t just an academic or economic debate. The president is trying to pass a radical welfare spending bill with a total cost bigger than the inflation-adjusted cost of FDR’s New Deal. Yet he’s misleading the public about its true cost — underselling the expense by more than $15,000 per federal taxpayer.
If Biden wants to spend that much taxpayer money, the very least we can ask is that he be upfront and honest about it.
Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is a libertarian-conservative journalist and a Washington Examiner contributor. Subscribe to his YouTube channel or email him at [email protected].
