Biden’s ‘Build Back’ bill is in worse shape than ever — hooray!
Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are no longer the only Democrats standing in the way of President Joe Biden’s spendapalooza “Build Back Better” bill: A pack of House Democrats are now on the record with doubts, demanding to see a Congressional Budget Office scoring of its costs and how far its tax hikes will go to offset them.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi had hoped to rush the House vote through without a CBO score (a tactic she denounced when Republicans were trying to do it just a few years back) last Friday, when the smaller bipartisan infrastructure bill did pass. But her more-moderate members refused, and the need for a score could push any meaningful floor vote past Thanksgiving.
Early indications are that an honest scoring would find that the bill is far from “paid for”: A Wharton School review late last week found it has a $470 billion funding hole, which is more than a quarter of its official $1.7 trillion price tag.
And that was a review of the “framework” the White House released last week; Pelosi has since added more goodies to the package, including a taxpayer-financed paid-family-leave program, as well as a fat tax break for the rich in the form of restored deductions for state and local taxes, a k a SALT.
The SALT giveaway was demanded by Democrats in high-tax states, including Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-Long Island), because they don’t want to drive rich taxpayers away. Will progressives like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-Bx/Queens) stand up for their principles and oppose it?
On top of this, the CBO has to take at face value the pretense that the bill’s many social-spending programs will expire after just three or four years, even though they’re “paid for” by 10 years of tax hikes. If the programs were actually to last the full decade, the cost would be more like $4 trillion.
Perhaps most important, there’s no real public appetite for this package: It’s just a selection of Bernie Sanders’ wish list, and he couldn’t even beat a then-more-conservative Biden for the Democratic nomination last year.
Pelosi is loyally trying to try to drag it over the House finish line, but its chances of passing in any form look increasingly poor.
And that’s reason to cheer, because “Build Back Better” would in fact discourage work, further fuel inflation and generally build more Bidenomics drag on the US economy.
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