The infrastructure bill currently making its way through Congress is going to be more expensive than we are being told, if you can believe it.
The Congressional Budget Office has found that the bill will end up contributing $256 billion to the deficit over the course of a decade.
The Washington Post reports:
Senate infrastructure deal would add hundreds of billions of dollars to the deficit, CBO saysThe bipartisan infrastructure deal moving through the Senate would increase the federal deficit by hundreds of billions of dollars, Congress’s nonpartisan scorekeeper said Thursday, contradicting the claims of the plan’s authors.The estimate could strain political support for the $1 trillion infrastructure package among some Republicans who have said they are concerned about its impact on the deficit. Some of the GOP lawmakers who helped broker the deal are expected to continue supporting the package, however, making the fate of the measure unclear. A final vote could come as early as Thursday evening.The plan would directly add $256 billion to the deficit over the next 10 years, the Congressional Budget Office found, although budget experts say that probably understates the cost of the package overall. That is because the plan would also approved roughly $90 billion of spending in new “contract authority” over five years, funding that would be authorized but would not be spent until appropriators decide where it goes.
CNBC has a reaction from the bill’s defenders in the Senate explaining how the bill is paid for:
Senators who crafted the plan had said it would be fully paid for through a range of sources including repurposed coronavirus relief funds, unused unemployment insurance aid and economic activity generated by the investments.In a statement responding to the CBO estimate, lead infrastructure negotiators Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, and Sen. Krysten Sinema, D-Ariz., said the bill’s spending “is offset through a combination of new revenue and savings, some of which is reflected in the formal CBO score and some of which is reflected in other savings and additional revenue identified in estimates, as CBO is limited in what it can include in its formal score.” They said they would work to get the bill passed by Congress and signed into law.The Senate was considering amendments to the bill Thursday, and Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., aims to pass it before early next week. The release of the CBO report was one of the key steps remaining before the Senate votes on the proposal.
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has been pushing harder than anyone to get this bill passed. Last week, he said that without the Democrats’ massive spending, the ‘climate crisis’ will be worse than COVID. Watch:
That might be why this tidbit about studying a ‘fee per-mile driven’ policy is tucked away in the ‘infrastructure’ bill.
I’m amazed that this bill has any Republican support, but at this point maybe I shouldn’t be.
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