With Any Luck, The Massive Spending Bill Dies in the Senate

I'm sure everyone knows that the House passed the so-called “Build Back Better” (BBB or bbb) plan early Friday, a multi-trillion-dollar welfare and climate change spending bill.  Democrats passed the bill unilaterally and later than planned thanks to a record-setting length speech against it but it still passed. 

With any luck, the Senate will not pass this abomination.  It's a terrible tarball of bad ideas and bad laws.  

To begin with, you'll see it called a $1.85 trillion spending bill.  That's by writing all sorts of tricks into it, like starting a giveaway for 10 years but ending funding early.  You know that saying, "nothing is as permanent as a temporary government program?" (number 4)  That's what they're counting on.  They can't allocate the funds now, but they gamble those funds can get added in the future.  Once people get used to a handout they ask their congresscritter to keep it coming.  The Committee For a Responsible Federal Budget has analyzed the bill, concluding 

We estimate the House Build Back Better Act includes roughly $2.4 trillion of spending and tax cuts along with roughly $2.2 trillion of offsets. However, the bill relies on a number of sunsets and expirations to keep the official cost down. If the plan's temporary policies were made permanent, we find the cost would increase by as much as $2.5 trillion. As a result, the gross cost of the bill would more than double from $2.4 trillion to $4.9 trillion.

The Build Back Better Act relies on a number of arbitrary sunsets and expirations to lower the official cost of the bill. These include extending the American Rescue Plan's Child Tax Credit (CTC) increase and Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) expansion for a year, setting universal pre-K and child care subsidies to expire after six years, making the Affordable Care Act (ACA) expansions available through 2025, delaying the requirement that businesses amortize research and experimentation (R&E) costs until 2026, and setting several other provisions – from targeted tax credits to school lunch programs – to expire prematurely.

Just like back in September, they keep saying it will add nothing to the deficit.  Yeah, it may be more fiscally responsible to pair spending increases with tax hikes, but it doesn’t make them cost less, and the two combined don't make it cost nothing; they just get it closer to revenue neutral.  Except that it isn't revenue neutral.  The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) says it will add a bit over a third of a trillion dollars ($367 billion) to the debt.  I know in an era of $5 trillion bills, that doesn't sound like much, but hey, $367 billion is a mere $11,682 per second for a year.

According to the Yellenator, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, we can call it revenue neutral if we include the revenue the metric buttload of IRS agents that the bill talks of hiring will collect.  The CBO separately estimated that the IRS provision would bring in $207 billion in revenues over 10 years. The Treasury Department has said that the provision would yield $400 billion. 

It wouldn't be the socialist "Green New Deal" approximation that the bill is without absurd climate control stuff.  The bill funnels billions into electric vehicle subsidies that make almost zero difference on carbon emissions and pad the pockets of wealthy consumers. It similarly wastes billions funding a “Civilian Climate Corps” that would pay people to do environmental activism that even proponents admit won’t reduce emissions. I prefer to call that the Civilian Climate Karens because they're nothing but wokescolds who will attack and harass anyone guilty of whatever make believe climate "science" prohibition they think they see. 

Even halting all US vehicle emissions would barely make a dent in global emission levels, and make-work schemes like this would have no measurable impact, simply as a matter of scale.  

Many of the links I include in this post come from the daily mailing from FEE - the Foundation for Economic Education - which is compiled by Brad Polumbo.  It concludes with a couple of good paragraphs. 

Because the bill confiscates trillions from the private, productive sector and funnels it through the government’s political schemes, it will actually lead to lower wages, lower employment, and lower economic growth over the long-run. That’s the finding of analyses by the Wharton School of Business, the Tax Foundation, and too many other experts to count. (And no, the spending bill won’t reduce inflation as President Biden oddly claims). 
 
In sum, the Build Back Better agenda is a government spending bill that’s uniquely terrible even by the abysmally low standards we expect from Congress. The good news is that it doesn’t look like it’s going anywhere once it gets to the Senate.

Analysis provided by the Committee For a Responsible Federal Budget.

Just about all I can say about a bill like this is Let's Go Brandon!!