Long before the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported inflation had hit a 30-year high, Sen. Joe Manchin (D., W.Va.) raised concerns about how President Biden’s Build Back Better bill would affect the economy, the national debt, entitlements and especially inflation. To assess the bill’s potential consequences, he demanded, among other things, a complete budgetary scoring by the Congressional Budget Office, with no gimmicks, program sunsets or phony savings.
The CBO report, released Thursday, chronicles all the bill’s budgetary games. When all the gimmicks and sunsets are taken into account, the White House claim that the bill is fully paid for is the most fraudulent scoring claim ever made for a major policy proposal in the modern era. And the bipartisan bar is high.
