Joe Biden announced to Democrats that they have an agreement framework on the Build back Better bill. He’s hoping to have a deal in hand before he heads out of the country for the G20 meeting.
But as we noted, it remains to be seen if the progressives will go along with voting on the infrastructure bill, if there’s a framework for a deal on the bigger reconciliation bill.
The word is that the numbers for the Build Back Better bill are now at $1.75 trillion – down from the original stated $3.5 trillion — but as we said, that’s without a CBO score. It’s also without text for the bill, so it’s hard to assess.
But while we’d like to think that reduction on the numbers shows that some common sense is coming into play and that they’re chucking some of the stinker parts out of the bill, unfortunately, that might not be completely true.
Part of how they are reaching those numbers is that they are only scoring a few years of each new proposal: starting new giveaways, believing that Congress — after having them for a couple of years — would then not be able to cut them back. They’re also jacking around the start times to other programs so they are more hidden.
NY Post
In March’s stimulus law, for example, the child credit was temporarily increased from $2,000 per child to $3,000 (and $3.600 for children younger than 6 years) and eligibility expanded to include higher incomes. Democrats insist that this policy be made permanent for a total of $1.3 trillion in the next ten years. Yet the initial reconciliation proposal expanded the policy for just four years, and now the White House is calling for just a one-year extension — effectively hiding nearly $1.2 trillion in upcoming costs. Congress renews only a handful of tax cuts every December. The child credit will just be another extension.
The gimmick Olympics don’t stop with the child credit. According to reports, the White House proposed a three-to four year expiration date for some other initiatives like paid family leave and expanded Medicaid. A proposed new child care program — which a study by the left-wing People’s Policy Project shows could raise child care prices by $13,000 per year — would reportedly phase in slowly and expire after a few years. Another gimmick is that a Medicare new dental benefit will not be implemented until 2028 and its cost would rise once it is beyond the 10-year period.
Most cynical of all is the Democrats’ maneuver on the $10,000 cap on the state and local tax (SALT) deduction. House Democrats are attempting to remove the $10,000 limit immediately. The current cap expires at 2025. So to “pay for” that immediate $90 billion-per-year tax cut, Democrats would actually impose a new SALT cap beginning in 2026 — count that future revenue as an offset — and then quickly cancel the tax before it ever goes into effect. To put it another way, they create completely fake future policies to counter the fraudulent savings made today.
So basically, it’s all trick to cover-up the actual costs and how they will hit. NY Post calculates the actual cost at $7.5 Trillion using $2 Trillion as their basis. That’s before the text which might actually pump it up more. This is the massive spending extravaganza that the Biden team has shamelessly claimed would cost “zero dollars.”
Then their concept that somehow this is all going to be paid by taxes on the one percent isn’t based in reality. Not to mention if it actually cost “zero dollars,” why would you need to tax anyone to pay for it?
Based on their estimates, the tax covers only 10% of $3.5 trillion in spending bills.
What will happen to the other 90%?
You are the answer.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 27, 2021
That’s based on the unreal spending number being $3.5 trillion — not the actual number, which would then be more than $7.5 trillion, as we noted above.
Even unrealized capital gains are wanted to be taxed.
It’s a nightmare that hopefully will be soundly defeated.
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