President Biden and Democratic lawmakers are not happy with the Congressional Budget Office’s scoring of the “Build Back Better” Bill. The CBO believes the monetary projections of the 2,000 page proposal to increase economic development in the country are way too high. This is the bill that Biden claims will cost nothing and is already being debated by Congress. I spoke with Joel Griffith, Research Fellow of Financial Regulations for the Heritage Foundation to get some concrete details on Biden's proposal.
The Democrats have said that they are engaged in determining what the cost is going to be for the President’s spending bill. Do you know what it is?
They believe this massive amount of spending will somehow generate economic growth that will cover the costs of the bill. The problem with that is it's not based on any type of real math and no real economists, left or right, would suggest that. The estimate is going to be much higher than what the CBO estimates, because Congress isn't likely to let these programs expire. This is going to cost us trillion and trillions of dollars. It's an outright lie! It's not just about the spending. It's the fact that they will get the government involved in every aspect of our lives.
The Democrats are now campaigning to delegitimize the CBO saying that they don't can’t properly vet all of the provisions. If the CBO doesn't, then who does? How do we have some idea what's going to happen?
It's all laid out there, in English, in the 2,000 page bill. We know that they’re proposing to raise taxes on businesses to a level higher than Communist China. Democrats want to start handing out monthly checks to people who have children. They're going to hand out welfare checks for tens of millions of people. They want to make us all into a dependent class. They're pretending as if this is going to expire in a few years, because they want the bill to appear as if this is going to cost less. There's a whole section in there on energy that'll cause us to scrap a lot of our refineries, our pipelines, our natural gas plants and force the taxpayer to pour hundreds of billions of dollars into the green energy programs… I spent a lot of time reading through this bill trying to expose it for what it is. It puts us onto this super highway, down the road to serfdom by accomplishing some of the worst of the left wing dreams… they're using COVID as an excuse to do this, but it's incorporating a wishlist of radical left-wing items.
CBO Director Phillip Swagel gave some initial projections relative to the IRS provision of hiring more agents to go after wealthy tax cheats. The Democrats say hiring 90,000 more IRS agents will yield $400 billion.The CBO says that projection is inflated and it’s more like $120 billion over 10 years.
That $400 billion number is very inflated. We have estimates from the CBO, but also from leftwing and rightwing think tanks that say it doesn’t come close to that. Do we really want to be shaking down taxpayers? They act as if this is just going after tax cheats. They're going to be coming after businesses. If you're an entrepreneur, you're going to have to arm yourself with accountants and lawyers. Americans are going to run a much higher risk of being audited.
