This week is the week that the House was supposed vote on the Build Back Better bill after information from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) came in.
However, there are problems with whether that’s going to happen.
According to the NY Times, the CBO score now isn’t anticipated to come in until Friday, Nov. 19, which doesn’t leave a lot of the week left to get it done. According to CNN, it’s the end of the day Friday but that’s also when the House is scheduled to go into recess.
For everyone’s clarity, the agreement we signed with our coworkers was not for CBO Score. The agreement was made for additional financial information by CBO. It also stated that no vote would be held after Nov. 15. We trust our colleagues’ commitments. https://t.co/SCe51Ooi7W
— Rep. Pramila Jayapal (@RepJayapal) November 10, 2021
Dem TX Rep Cuellar discusses CBO score and social spending bill. This is not a shorthand one..we need to see the issues we are going to vote on. We’ll see what we get by Friday.
— Chad Pergram (@ChadPergram) November 15, 2021
But the bigger and probably more overarching problem for Joe Biden and the Democrats is what they’re going to reveal — that the bill isn’t paid for as Joe Biden claimed. They were lying, gee! I mean besides everyone who wasn’t gullible. But that’s why some of the moderates were likely hanging fire waiting on the score — they wanted a real assessment and didn’t trust Biden. They demand that the bill be fully funded.
NY Times
The director of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office stated Monday that I.R.S. proposal would yield far less than what the White House was counting on to help pay for its bill — about $120 billion over a decade versus the $400 billion that the administration is counting on. [….]
The White House began to prepare lawmakers for disappointing estimates from the budget office. They are likely to conclude that it will be difficult for them all to fully pay the total cost of this package with the new revenue they receive over the next decade.
How is the Brandon-Kurtenbach Administration managing this information? Don’t listen to that gold standard of the CBO score, they’re already arguing — believe us instead.
Top administration officials have urged lawmakers not to consider the budget office assessment. They claim it is too conservative in its calculations and fails to credit the return-on-investment of additional I.R.S. Resources and neglecting the tax-cheating deterrent effect that more aggressive tax collection agencies would have.
“In this one case, I think we’ve made a very strong empirical case for C.B.O. not having an accurate score,” Ben Harris, Treasury’s assistant secretary for economic policy, said in an interview. “The question is would they rather go with C.B.O. C.B.O. is wrong, or would they want to target the best information they could possibly have?”
You already had the moderates bristling over the price tag and some of the provisions, and that’s with the claim it was paid for. This news isn’t going to go over well with them, especially folks like Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ). In order to pass this, the Democrats need every Senate vote and they can’t lose more than three votes in the House, according to the Times.
So now it’s going to really be fish or cut bait time for the moderates. The CBO can be taken to task and used by them as an argument against this bill. Are they going to stick to their guns and not push through this pork-laden piece of something that’s going to drive up inflation and the deficit? Are they willing to compromise with the Progressives?
Once again, this says a lot about Biden’s honesty…or the lack thereof.
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