The Senate majority leader ignores what the West Virginia senator has been saying all along.
The Senate majority leader ignores what West Virginia senator Joe Manchin has been saying all along.
O n Friday, the Congressional Budget Office announced that if most of the key provisions in the “Build Back Better” reconciliation bill were made permanent, the legislation would actually add $3 trillion to the deficit over ten years — a finding that flatly contradicted President Biden’s claims that his social-spending bill wouldn’t add a single penny to the debt.
Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer lashed out on Friday in response to the report’s findings. “The Republican-requested fake CBO score does not take into account the fact that President Biden and Democrats have committed that any extensions of the Build Back Better Act in the future will be fully offset,” he said in a statement.
But Schumer’s spin on the CBO report was weak for two big reasons.
First, Schumer says that Democrats are “committed” to paying for extending the major provisions of the bill, but he doesn’t identify how they might raise that revenue. Schumer can’t say where Democrats would find that $3 trillion over ten years, though, because raising that the money would obviously require the kinds of tax hikes that surely do not have 50 Democratic votes in the U.S. Senate.
The second reason why Schumer’s spin was ineffective is that West Virginia Democratic senator Joe Manchin hasn’t merely drawn a line against a reconciliation bill that adds to the deficit; Manchin has also insisted that the total amount of new spending should not exceed $1.75 trillion even if it is paid for. “Why I Won’t Support Spending Another $3.5 Trillion” read the headline of Manchin’s September 2 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. Even in some hypothetical world in which 50 Senate Democrats were willing and able to raise the nearly $5 trillion necessary to finance the “Build Back Better” bill’s true ten-year cost, how would that win over Joe Manchin’s vote?
There’s no sign at the moment that Manchin is buying Schumer’s spin. While Schumer called Friday’s CBO report a “Republican-requested fake CBO score,” Manchin told reporters on Monday that the Friday announcement from CBO was “sobering.”
“CBO’s not a Republican or Democrat report,” Manchin said on Monday. “They’re nonpartisan, and they’re going to give it to us the way — the facts the way we like it or not.”
While the CBO report did come at the request of congressional Republicans, the projected cost simply vindicated the argument that Manchin has been making for many weeks.
On November 1, as the House prepared to pass both the infrastructure and reconciliation bills, Manchin blasted the “shell games” and “gimmicks” in the House Democrats’ reconciliation bill. “As more of the real details in the basic outline of the framework are released, what I see are shell games, budget gimmicks that make the real cost of the so-called $1.75 trillion bill estimated to be almost twice that amount if the full time is run out — if you extended it permanently,” Manchin said. “This is a recipe for economic crisis.”
Yet when Manchin spoke on November 1, he didn’t know that he was actually underestimating the true cost of the program, over ten years. Indeed, whereas his projection was that the bill would cost “almost” $3.5 trillion, the CBO made clear on Friday that number is actually more than $4.6 trillion.
At this point, something has to give for the Democrats to enact the “Build Back Better” reconciliation bill. Either Manchin caves and votes for a bill that is two or three times more expensive than the $1.75 trillion bill to which he has been amenable, or Democrats trim the bill down so the cost is actually less than $2 trillion. The problem with the latter approach, as the CBO made clear on Friday, is that extending new child tax credits over a decade will add $1.6 trillion to the deficit. That single provision would eat up almost the entirety of a Manchin-sized reconciliation bill.
It’s possible that Manchin will back down, but at the moment he’s giving no sign he has any intention to do so. On Friday, Manchin was handing out palm cards to colleagues and reporters pointing out that while Congress has already spent an additional $6.6 trillion on Covid relief and infrastructure since March 2020, the entire inflation-adjusted financial cost of World War II was $4.5 trillion.