Reason’s Eric Boehm writes, “President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better Act is likely to end up costing taxpayers about double what the official price tag suggests, and much of that hidden cost will end up being added to the national debt.

If all the Build Back Better plan’s proposals were made permanent, the final price tag would be $4.8 trillion and the bill would add about $2.8 trillion to the deficit.https://t.co/eUhD1G1eRQ

— reason (@reason) December 2, 2021

That’s the conclusion from two independent analyses of the proposal released in recent weeks. Both rely on a key assumption that did not figure into the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) analysis of the bill: that the Build Back Better plan’s various policies will be in place for at least the next 10 years.

‘The Build Back Better Act relies on a number of arbitrary sunsets and expirations to lower the official cost of the bill,’ explains the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), a nonprofit that advocates for balanced budgets. The group’s newly updated analysis of the Build Back Better plan finds that the package will cost an estimated $4.8 trillion over 10 years if all provisions are made permanent—double the price tag applied by the CBO last month.”

Read the entire column.

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FEE’s Peter Jacobsen writes, “Congress recently passed the White House’s Infrastructure Bill to the tune of $1 trillion. President Joe Biden is expected to sign the legislation into law on Monday.

In the lead-up to the vote, the administration and House Democrats were oddly adamant that the bill would cost zero dollars. That’s right, a free $1 trillion infrastructure bill.

There’s no such thing as free infrastructure. https://t.co/O5AbacTK0j

— FEE (@feeonline) November 15, 2021

Another FEE article already debunked this claim with thorough examination of the concept of forgone alternatives. However, following the poor reception of the rhetoric that the infrastructure bill would cost nothing, messaging seems to have pivoted to a less dubious position. Namely, that the infrastructure bill will not add a penny to the deficit.

There is more truth to this assertion than the last, but a thorough examination still finds this claim wanting. Why? In order to understand, we need to, again, consider the forgone alternatives.”

Read the entire column.

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