Deciding whether politicians are liars or idiots is great fun as a parlor game.
Not so much in real world budgeting.
From CNBC, February 8:
- The Congressional Budget Office estimates the federal deficit will grow by $1 trillion over the next 10 years.
- Part of that growth will be driven by unexpectedly high costs related to President Joe Biden’s signature policy goal: Reorienting the U.S. economy to greener energy.
- EV tax credit costs and falling gas tax revenues will add $224 billion to the deficit over 10 years, CBO projects.
The U.S. budget deficit will grow by an estimated $1 trillion over the next 10 years, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projected in a new report Wednesday.
Part of that growth will be driven by unexpectedly high costs related to President Joe Biden’s signature policy goal: Reorienting the U.S. economy towards greener energy, the CBO found.
“I came to office determined to ... face the existential threat of climate and still grow, to fundamentally change our economy, and to transition this country to a clean energy future,” Biden said last October.
The CBO projections offer a new window into how much Biden’s green energy agenda is going to cost the federal government to fully implement over the next decade.
Taken together, CBO estimates that the impact of new emissions standards, clean energy tax credits and falling gas tax revenue as people buy less gas, will add $25 billion to the budget deficit this year. Over a decade, CBO projects they will add $428 billion to the cumulative deficit.
More than half of that, $224 billion, is from “projections of amounts claimed for clean vehicle tax credits and of [lower] revenues from excise taxes on gasoline.”
“The costs of energy-related tax provisions are much higher than ... originally projected,” said CBO director Philip Swagel at a press event Wednesday. “Those costs reflect new emissions standards, market developments, and actions taken by the administration to implement the tax provisions.”
Hours before the CBO report was released, the Environmental Protection Agency announced just such an action: Final emissions standards that lower the maximum allowable levels of fine particles, or soot.
The CBO also noted that there are still many unknowns about how green energy will impact the economy and the federal budget longer term. As a result “the budgetary effects of energy-related tax provisions remain highly uncertain.”....
....MUCH MORE
Previously: