If you are struggling to understand why Senator Joe Manchin refuses to bend-the-knee to his progressive pals' massive social-spending plan, prepare for some cognitive dissonance.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/fuzzy-math-democrats-deficit-neut...
Why wouldn't he just go along with it? After all, the smartest Democrats have all declared the colossal spend-fest is 'free', right?
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has trotted out this argument with great confidence.
"It's not about a dollar amount,” she told reporters.
“The dollar amount, as the president said, is zero. This bill will be paid for.”
And White House chief of staff Ron Klain also shamelessly proclaims:
“the net cost of Build Back Better is zero."
And sympathetic journalists have picked up the mantra.
But - as you may suspect - it's all a bunch of bullshit premised on what Manchin called "budget gimmicks... and shell games." In fact, as CNBC's Ylan Mui noted this morning, it's "fuzzy math,"and citing work based on the Penn Wharton Budget Model (PWBM), the cost of this new new deal is over $4.1 trillion and only $1.554 trillion is paid for.
"While Democrats are claiming they have cut the price tag of the social spending package by more than half, they are using some fuzzy math..." Mui begins, noting "the most glaring example is that of repealing the SALT cap for the next five years, but they claim they 'pay' for that by reinstating it for the following five years."
Additionally Mui notes that various packages at the heart of the bill, such as Universal Pre-K, Medicaid expansion, and Child tax credits all end after just a few years (6 years, 4 years, and 1 year respectively), and of course, those 'free' handouts then become political hand grenades to hold over the Republicans as they expire.
The Democrats are open about this plan, as Mui notes, "their strategy is to start as many new projects as possible and then build public support around them."
As Milton Friedman infamously noted: "there is nothing so permanent as a temporary government program."
Critically, PWBM has estimated the scenario where all spending and revenue provisions in the Build Back Better Framework are permanent and the gap between spending and revenues is over $2.5 trillion... which, the last time we checked is not equal to zero...
As Rich Lowry wrote at Politico recently, trying to redefine the cost of a multi-trillion bill as zero must rank among the most shameless, patently absurd attempts to change reality through a talking point ever attempted. It’s mind-bending logic that would mystify Lewis Carroll at the height of his creative powers.
Well, if anything has been confirmed by the last 24 hours, it appears the American public is done believing in fairy tales and is rapidly transitioning back to the real world.
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BREAKING: FBI Raids Project Veritas Over Ashley Biden’s Diary
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/11/fbi-raids-project-veritas-...
U.S. Sen Angus King
Maine as Third World Country:
CMP Transmission Rate Skyrockets 19.6% Due to Wind Power
Click here to read how the Maine ratepayer has been sold down the river by the Angus King cabal.
Maine Center For Public Interest Reporting – Three Part Series: A CRITICAL LOOK AT MAINE’S WIND ACT
******** IF LINKS BELOW DON'T WORK, GOOGLE THEM*********
(excerpts) From Part 1 – On Maine’s Wind Law “Once the committee passed the wind energy bill on to the full House and Senate, lawmakers there didn’t even debate it. They passed it unanimously and with no discussion. House Majority Leader Hannah Pingree, a Democrat from North Haven, says legislators probably didn’t know how many turbines would be constructed in Maine if the law’s goals were met." . – Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting, August 2010 https://www.pinetreewatchdog.org/wind-power-bandwagon-hits-bumps-in-the-road-3/From Part 2 – On Wind and Oil Yet using wind energy doesn’t lower dependence on imported foreign oil. That’s because the majority of imported oil in Maine is used for heating and transportation. And switching our dependence from foreign oil to Maine-produced electricity isn’t likely to happen very soon, says Bartlett. “Right now, people can’t switch to electric cars and heating – if they did, we’d be in trouble.” So was one of the fundamental premises of the task force false, or at least misleading?" https://www.pinetreewatchdog.org/wind-swept-task-force-set-the-rules/From Part 3 – On Wind-Required New Transmission Lines Finally, the building of enormous, high-voltage transmission lines that the regional electricity system operator says are required to move substantial amounts of wind power to markets south of Maine was never even discussed by the task force – an omission that Mills said will come to haunt the state.“If you try to put 2,500 or 3,000 megawatts in northern or eastern Maine – oh, my god, try to build the transmission!” said Mills. “It’s not just the towers, it’s the lines – that’s when I begin to think that the goal is a little farfetched.” https://www.pinetreewatchdog.org/flaws-in-bill-like-skating-with-dull-skates/
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Hannah Pingree - Director of Maine's Office of Innovation and the Future
"Once the committee passed the wind energy bill on to the full House and Senate, lawmakers there didn’t even debate it. They passed it unanimously and with no discussion. House Majority Leader Hannah Pingree, a Democrat from North Haven, says legislators probably didn’t know how many turbines would be constructed in Maine."
https://pinetreewatch.org/wind-power-bandwagon-hits-bumps-in-the-road-3/
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