EDITORIAL: CBO to deliver bad news about Build Back Better

The White House has assured Americans that the colossal expansion of the federal government known as the Build Back Better bill will cost “zero dollars.” Like Bill Clinton’s classic “the meaning of the word is is” quote, the intent is to obfuscate and deceive. It’s patently preposterous to argue that a $1.75 trillion proposal will be free. But in Biden Fantasyland, when you raise taxes to pay for something, the cost is “nothing.”

Now, however, this bit of verbal prestidigitation — like many of the administration’s famously faulty assumptions on Afghanistan or inflation over the past few months — has fallen victim to reality.

On Monday, The New York Times reported that the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has concluded that the mechanisms by which the White House hopes to “pay for” its social spending and entitlement blowout will fall short of raising the necessary funds. In particular, a provision intended to generate $400 billion by siccing the IRS on U.S. taxpayers suspected of evading their obligations will raise just 30 percent of that amount, the CBO believes.

Similarly, an analysis by Penn’s Wharton School of Business released last week determined that higher taxes and ramped-up IRS enforcement measures in the legislation will generate about $470 billion less than the $1.75 trillion cost.

The CBO will release its final “scoring” of the proposal on Friday, and its findings could further diminish the likelihood that Democrats can ram the bill through Congress. Five House moderates (paging Rep. Susie Lee) said they would probably oppose Build Back Better if it added to the deficit, which would doom the bill. Sen. Joe Manchin has expressed similar concerns in the upper chamber, where Democrats can’t afford a single defection.

In a pre-emptive measure, “The White House has begun bracing lawmakers for a disappointing estimate from the budget office,” The Times reported, adding that the administration is “urging lawmakers to disregard the budget office assessment, saying it is being overly conservative in its calculations.”

In fact, the opposite is true. The CBO must work within certain parameters, but an honest assessment of the legislation would find that the only way supporters can plausibly claim to “pay for” such reckless spending is through Washington accounting gimmickry. Among other schemes, Democrats have included abbreviated or sunsetting new entitlements in the bill to disguise their true costs while admitting that they intend to expand the programs and ignore the sunsets. The Wall Street Journal described it as a “mammoth fiscal confidence trick.”

If Democrats insist that Build Back Better is “paid for,” perhaps they can identify for the taxpayer the last historic entitlement bill — during the New Deal or the Great Society — that came in at or below projections. Exactly.