House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn went on MSNBC Monday to argue for Democrats’ massive social spending bill. His main argument was that the media and lawmakers should stop mentioning the 10-year cost of their tax-and-spend bill — officially $3.5 trillion.
“We need to stop talking about these 10-year numbers,” Clyburn said on Morning Joe. He stated this opinion twice, including at the very beginning of the interview.
His argument was that people assume that $3.5 trillion is getting spent in a single year, while really Democrats are trying to add an average of $350 billion per year. This argument is coming from a Democratic Party leader on a Monday morning on national cable television, implying that it’s part of a new messaging strategy: Stop mentioning the 10-year costs, and don’t let journalists get away with mentioning the 10-year costs.
This is slippery for at least two reasons.
First, Clyburn, like every other Democrat and every single commentator and reporter, always uses 10-year “costs” for bills that reduce the tax burden. Here’s a video of Clyburn himself, on the House floor in 2017, complaining that a bill shrinks tax loopholes for rich people but lowers tax rates and so reduces revenue over the course of a decade: “This tax scam caps deductions for state and local taxes, and home mortgages, and adds over $2 trillion dollars to the deficit.”
The New York Times, of course, called it a “$1.5 trillion tax overhaul.”
The Clyburn argument is also slippery because the 10-year cost of the Democrats’ bill dramatically understates the expected annual costs of the legislation by playing typical old budget games. The bill cuts off the child allowance in 2025 in order to save hundreds of billions, although no Democrats are pitching this as a 4-year child allowance. The bill also delays its Medicare expansion until 2028, which reduces the official 10-year cost of the bill by $450 billion.
The bill has other budget tricks, including new mandates whose costs the bill shifts to states — meaning the governmental cost of the bill is far beyond the federal cost of the bill.
Nevertheless, expect to see Democrats bang this drum — STOP TALKING ABOUT 10-YEAR COSTS — and pay attention to who in the media starts dancing to their beat.
