Last week, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reported that the benefit programs created or extended only temporarily in Democrats’ trillion-dollar Build Back Better plan would cost significantly more if they operated permanently. For example, CBO previously estimated the one-year extension of expanded, monthly, and fully refundable child credit checks included in that bill would cost some $120 billion. But their latest report suggests that providing the same benefits permanently, as President Biden and other key Democrats have said they intend to do, would cost another nearly $1.6 trillion in this decade alone.

If all such temporary benefits in the bill were made permanent, a staggering $3 trillion would be added to the deficit, according to CBO. None of that is reflected in the official score of the House-passed legislation, which the President argues is “fully paid for.”

This episode should surprise absolutely no one, as respected nonpartisan experts like the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget have been making the same points for months. They and others have suggested the bill’s authors continue to rely heavily on budget gimmicks — especially authorizing just a few years of spending offset by 10 years of tax hikes — to make it appear “paid for.” Yet White House press secretary Jen Psaki this week dismissed such concerns, calling the latest CBO report “a fake score about a bill that doesn’t exist.”

But consider the additional benefit spending over the coming
decade that CBO previously reported would result from the Build Back Better legislation
Ms. Psaki is defending, and which the Senate is now considering:

As the chart shows, spending on the new benefits supporters call “transformative” would rise dramatically in the coming years and then . . . mostly fade away. What’s transformative about that? Nothing, unless you are banking on these expanded but nominally short-term benefits being extended by future Congresses, while avoiding those costs in the current bill you are claiming is fully paid for.

The latest CBO report catalogues the bizarre patchwork of temporary benefits driving the rising and falling spending picture above, including:

• one year of child
  tax credit expansions
• one year of earned
  income tax credit expansions
• three years of
  summer Electronic Benefit Transfer payments
• four years of Trade
  Adjustment Assistance benefits
• four years of new compensation
  for journalists
• five years of health
  insurance subsidies
• six years of
  expanded childcare and preschool benefits

Perhaps all of that makes perfect sense, and lawmakers crafting
these policies know something the rest of us don’t. For example, maybe they have
inside knowledge that the cost of raising a child will drop dramatically after
2022, obviating the need for continued larger child credit payments. Or maybe
they have secret intelligence that food costs will plummet in the summer of
2025, ending the need for expanded EBT payments then. Perhaps journalists will see
as-yet-unknown wage hikes after 2025, and child care costs will miraculously
plunge in 2028, so those new benefit programs can harmlessly end, too.

If you believe any of that, you must be new to Washington.
The reality is this bizarre timeline was crafted to minimize the bill’s apparent
costs and maximize the chances these benefits are extended in the future — when
they also will be used as a political cudgel against those who oppose their
continuation.

If the Build Back Better plan is enacted, whenever these programs approach their expiration dates, Democrats and perhaps more than a few Republicans will loudly proclaim the need to extend them again, even if suitable tax hikes regrettably cannot be identified and the costs simply must be added to the deficit. Some might even argue it would be heartless to let millions of new recipients hit “benefit cliffs” — as soon as next Christmas! — they specifically fashioned to minimize the apparent cost of this legislation. Prepare the stocking and coal props!

As that all plays out, the bill that Ms. Psaki says “doesn’t exist” today will come into clearer view, and its “fake score” — including literally trillions of dollars in additional spending — will become decidedly more real to taxpayers with each passing year. And Americans will learn too late it was the design and marketing of the Build Back Better plan that was fake, and not the latest CBO score.

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