Have you noticed how Democrats have kept changing their justifications for the Build Back Better bill over the course of the year?
It started off as President Joe Biden’s effort to “transform” the nation à la FDR, spent some time as his prescription to get the economy going post-COVID and now is somehow supposed to be the cure for inflation. All under the very same label.
What’s the real purpose?
Don’t try to find any policy logic for why some pieces have been jettisoned and others made shorter-lasting. Heck, the major chunk we flagged on Saturday, the huge SALT tax giveaway to the rich, was only added this month. Why? It plainly has nothing to do with the nation’s needs now as opposed to months ago, when the BBB ball got rolling. Yet it will cost Uncle Sam more than the bill’s family-leave provisions for working Americans that Democrats pitch as one of the package’s most important parts.
Why, exactly, does the bill expand the per-child tax exemption for just one year and the same for Earned Income Tax Credits? And various ObamaCare subsidies only through 2025? Why specific sums through 2024 of $18 billion for universal pre-K and $100 billion for child-care vouchers and then “such sums as necessary” for three more years?
Why spend $12 billion to increase college Pell Grants for just four years? Why end the green-energy subsidies after just one year, when even the most ambitious Dems don’t expect to make the nation carbon-neutral before 2030?
The very title, “Build Back Better,” implies building something permanent, not a bunch of giveaways that expire in a few years.
All of it, mind you, paid for by tax hikes that last a full 10 years. It’d make a lot more sense to choose fewer priorities and fund them for exactly as long as the taxes that are supposed to pay for them.
Especially since these subsidies will tend to increase costs forever: Universities for decades have been hiking tuition to match whatever the feds dole out in student aid, for example.
The bill vastly increases what day-care centers must pay their workers; the resulting rise in what the centers must charge parents won’t stop when the subsidies run out. (And many middle-class families will be stuck paying a lot more from the start, since they’ll get no subsidy, but that’s another editorial.) This guarantees a major crisis for working parents in 2028.
Yes, part of the answer is that Dems are trying to hide the “true cost” because they can’t pass it via reconciliation (and thus without GOP votes in the Senate) unless it’s officially “deficit neutral” over a decade. They figure Congress will just have to hike taxes even more rather than let all the benefits end.
Yet that wouldn’t stop them from focusing on the most urgent priorities and funding them fully if any of them actually were urgent.
The truth is that the only urgency here is Democrats’ urge to spend.
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November 22, 2021 at 06:18AM
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The only 'logic' behind Build Back Better is Democrats' desire to spend - New York Post
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