SHELL GAMES: PLAYING WITH OUR MONEY

The Chinese have a saying: To get rich, first build a road. That may be why the infrastructure bill recently passed by Congress was semi-bipartisan. Republicans use roads and bridges, too.

And for all of the massive spending and national debt, better roads and airports and bridges and internet connections will improve not only the efficiency of business (and boost the economy) in this country, but improve the standard of living, too. We can argue about how much to spend on this kind of thing, but infrastructure itself is something that government ought to do.

The next spending bill — the $1.7 trillion one, funding child care and Obamacare extension, among many other things — is a social spending plan. And there are more arguments against it. One is that the bill’s authors aren’t being entirely honest.

They appear to be playing something of a shell game with the cost of the bill. Its writers, for example, say that such-and-such line item will only cost X amount of dollars. But that’s with cost sunsets.

Take child care and preschool: The White House’s estimate is that those programs will cost $390 billion. But the costs “stop” in 2027 when the thing supposedly sunsets. Does anybody really believe that in 2027, after five or six years of free child care, that Americans will be okay with the government ceasing its funding of it? When was the last time an entitlement was put to pasture?

The Child Tax Credit’s sunset is one year, after 2022. So the White House says it’ll only cost $170 billion. Others estimate its costs into the trillions, and lasting forever. Which one is more likely, Gentle Reader? We may have been born at night, but it wasn’t last night.

Credit the U.S. Chamber of Commerce for beating this drum. This past week, the chamber sent an open letter to Congress, exposing this scheme. The Congressional Budget Office’s researchers are still scoring the next spending bill, but the chamber’s honchos have beat them to it.

“As currently drafted,” the chamber says, “the reconciliation bill would expand or create new entitlement programs and refundable tax credits, but then sunsets many of these programs — in some cases after just one year — to disguise the true cost of the bill. Given that the bill’s proponents clearly intend for these programs to continue past their sunset, lawmakers should be provided with a Congressional Budget Office estimate of the true cost of the bill if these programs were permanent.”

The chamber says the real cost could be well over $1 trillion more than the White House estimates. But that in itself might be an understatement. For if more entitlements go on the books, and they last forever, then how to estimate any cost? Just say “unlimited” and leave it at that.

The chamber’s lead man on policy, Neil Bradley, added: “It would be the height of irresponsibility for members of Congress to vote on this multitrillion-dollar tax-and-spend bill with no clear understanding of its true cost or the real world impact of the policies.”

Height of irresponsibility. And, we’d add, the height of dishonesty, unless the votes are taken with real numbers before the American people.