After months of wrangling, Democrats claim they are close to reaching agreement on a fully paid $1.75 trillion, 10-year Build Back Better plan.
None of that is correct. Regardless, dismissive Senator Joe Manchin says a deal is unlikely before President Joe Biden travels to Rome on Thursday. Democratic sleight of hand has 10 years of tax increases that pay off just a few years of their spending.
And that’s only part of the absurdity here. Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-Penn) joke illustrates the faltering state of the effort: “We’re just missing two things,” namely, “what exactly is going to be on the bill and how are we going to pay for it. Other than that, we’re fine.”
That is, it remains unclear what Democrats will cut out of Senator Bernie Sanders’ scheme for an unprecedented increase in the size of the government, including new health care benefits, free community college, free pre-school for 3 and 4 years – seniors, paid family leave Pay, along with plenty of Green New Deal.
What is clear is that Democrats are determined to hide the true costs. As Brian Riedl details for The Post, “legislators are crafting new initiatives worth $4 trillion but simply using fake expiration dates to record only a few years from each offer.”
Despite the false expiration dates, they accident About their programs as permanent.
They want the temporary child tax credit of up to $3,600 per child to be eternal, for example, but their initial plan counted costs for four years and now they’re talking about only one year coverage. But whatever tax increases are passed to pay for it, it will cover 10 years – requiring more tax increases (or new borrowing) to fund the true cost of about $1.2 trillion over a decade.
They play the same games with other expensive items, like paid family leave and Medicaid expansion.
This does not mean that they still know what taxes they will raise. Senator Kirsten Senema killed Plan A, a heavy corporate and income tax hike, but she and Manchin appear to agree with the minimum corporate profit tax rate of 15 percent. But that would also put the faltering economy at risk – And They won’t raise anything like nearly $2 trillion over a decade that they pretend the bill will cost him.
The day before, headlines indicated that they would solve the problem of a “wealth tax” on billionaires. Now Representative Dan Kildy (D-Mich.) of the House Ways and Means Committee calls this “more than a stunt.”
The whole thing is a gimmick, and Enronisk’s accounting is just another sign that this entire effort is nothing but a convulsive attempt to pass on “something big,” with what actually goes into it a whole afterthought.
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