Five ostensibly “moderate” House Democrats just decided to vote for a lousy bill based on “garbage-in, garbage-out” budget numbers. They and other swing-district Democrats who don’t want moderate voters to throw them out should not try to hide behind the Congressional Budget Office.
The five — Ed Case of Hawaii, Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey, Stephanie Murphy of Florida, Kathleen Rice of New York, and Kurt Schrader of Oregon — issued a statement saying they “commit to voting for” President Joe Biden’s hugely bloated Build Back Better bill if the CBO confirms that the bill’s numbers are “consistent with the toplines” claimed by the White House on both spending and revenue.
We know from both the centrist Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget and from researchers at the Wharton School that Biden’s BBB bill almost assuredly will cost far more than the White House claims while raising far less revenue. The CFRB hasn’t provided an exact figure, but the Wharton researchers and the conservative Heritage Foundation estimate the true costs in the $4 trillion range, more than twice the fraudulent $1.75 trillion figure touted by Biden.
What these five Democrats surely know but don’t want the public to figure out is that the CBO estimate is likely to be more gimmick than reality. It’s not that the CBO economists are dishonest — it is that that they are constrained to apply budget-estimating rules that allow for the gimmicks in the first place, and they have to apply them to numbers that were supplied by dishonest Democrats.
If Congress writes the law so as to hide the true costs of a bill by, for example, defining its parameters in ways that push those costs beyond the 10-year “budget window,” the CBO is required to participate in their fiction, counting only the costs within the window. If Congress creates a program it fully expects to be renewed after several years but only authorizes it for two years, then the CBO is not allowed to “count” the estimated costs of the likely renewal. And so on.
In short, at least on the spending side, the CBO can only use the assumptions fed to it in the first place, no matter how transparently mendacious those assumptions are.
On the revenue side, however, the CBO need not provide Biden as much cover as he wants. When BBB’s sponsors claim that an extra $80 billion spent by the IRS will allow the agency to drain an astonishing $400 billion more from taxpayers’ pockets, for example, that number is just a pure guess, not even relying on preestablished gimmick rules that the CBO must respect. If the White House uses the whole, utterly unrealistic $400 billion guesstimate as a way to justify its claim that the legislation will be “fully paid for,” the CBO need not let them get away with it.
The five representatives who made the pledge on Friday, along with five others who hold seats in districts carried by former President Donald Trump, plus several others who won their races by very tight margins, are all playing with fire if they expect voters to trust abstruse budget estimates rather than voters’ own commonsense perceptions about how outlandishly large the spending bill is. Ditto for Democratic U.S. Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, who so far have been more willing to tell budgetary truths in public than the House members have.
Voters hate price inflation, and they know that a big-spending federal government exacerbates inflation. No matter what the CBO says, voters will blame any members of Congress who further feed the inflationary beast.
