The Biden administration has contended that its “Build Back Better” agenda would cost nothing. The Congressional Budget Office now says that’s at least a few hundred billion dollars off.
The CBO’s director estimates that the proposal to amp up the Internal Revenue Service’s crackdown on tax evaders would bring in about $120 billion, well short of the $400 billion the administration was counting on. According to the New York Times, “The White House has begun bracing lawmakers for a disappointing estimate from the budget office, which is likely to find that the cost of the overall package will not be fully paid for with new tax revenue over the coming decade.” (The CBO report is expected to be released Friday.)
It was already absurd that President Joe Biden and his staff were insisting that just because his plan was (ostensibly) paid for, that it then cost $0. After all, you don’t pay for things that cost nothing. But it turns out that, predictably, even that claim wasn’t even true because Biden and his team were overstating how much revenue they were bringing in and low-balling the cost.
West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin correctly identified this, calling them shell games and noting “budget gimmicks that make the real cost of the so-called $1.75 trillion bill estimated to be almost twice that amount, if the full time is run out, if you extended it permanently.” Some of his fellow Democrats have decided that the Congressional Budget Office just doesn’t know how to budget.
It was evident that this was how this would play out from the start. Centrist Democrats should kill the bill and not let themselves get talked into the “no-cost” fantasy that the Biden administration has been pushing.
