How will Bidet pay for the infrastructure bill?
The bill includes a multitude of measures to pay for the proposal.
But while lawmakers claim the bill pays for itself, the CBO score found it would instead add billions of dollars to the deficit over 10 years and that many of the pay-for provisions would not raise as much money as Democrats said they would.
The bottom line is that the legislation would directly add roughly $350 billion to the deficit, when taking into account $90 billion of spending in new contract authority, said Marc Goldwein, senior vice president at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan group that tracks federal spending.
According to the bill text and a 57-page summary of the bill, lawmakers leaned heavily on repurposing unused Covid-19 relief funds to pay for the legislation. The CBO found these measures would provide roughly $22 billion in savings, rather than the roughly $263 billion claimed by lawmakers, Goldwein said.
The bill text lists savings from rescinding unobligated appropriations for the Economic Injury Disaster Loan program for small businesses and nonprofit groups, the Paycheck Protection Program, the Education Stabilization Fund and relief for airline workers, among others.
Programs that were not paid for and added to the debt yet re repurposed without the debt thy created originally.
Another item in the bill text is $53 billion that stems in part from states opting to terminate the pandemic unemployment benefits early in hopes of pushing the jobless to return to work. Some 24 states stopped at least one of the federal unemployment programs before they officially ended in early September. Also, the CBO reduced its forecast for the unemployment rate because of the improving economy.
Also, the agency found that the Federal Communications Commission’s spectrum auctions would generate far less than the $87 billion originally claimed by lawmakers.
The CBO also said that the bill would raise about $50 billion by imposing new Superfund fees and changing the tax reporting requirements for cryptocurrencies, among other measures.
More savings would come from delaying a controversial Trump administration rule that would radically change how drugs are priced and paid for in Medicare and Medicaid until 2026, at the earliest. The measure would effectively ban drug makers from providing rebates to pharmacy benefit managers and insurers. Instead, drug companies would be encouraged to pass the discounts directly to patients at the pharmacy counter. It is currently expected to go into effect in 2023. The summary lists the savings as $49 billion and the CBO report as nearly $51 billion.
Delaying spending money they will spend creating more debt is beyond laughable as saving money.
Also, the infrastructure proposal relies on generating $56 billion in economic growth resulting from a 33% return on investment on the long-term projects, according to the summary.
The main gimmick that is being talked about right now is time shifting. This takes advantage of the way the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) produces cost estimates: by looking at the 10-year cost of the legislation. That 10-year period is known as a “budget window.” So if legislation calls for a program to start five years into the 10-year budget window, the CBO score will only reflect five years of spending. Similarly, if a program is scheduled, on paper, to only last for five years, then the CBO will only score that many years of spending—even if the authors of the bill make quite clear, in some other forum, that they intend for the program to be reauthorized and continued for the entire 10 years. The CBO, for good reason, scores legislative text, not legislator remarks or intentions, so if there’s a cutoff date built into the text of the legislation, then that’s what the CBO estimates.