I hope that everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving. By the way, how do you know when you have eaten too much over the Holiday? You have to take out your bathrobe.
The somewhat scaled back Build Back Better Act, Human Infrastructure Bill, Reconciliation Bill, call it what you will, is still constantly in the news. Am I the only one who wishes that Congress would just pass it or drop it, so we wouldn’t have to keep hearing the same old things, with no real new information or analysis to allow us to critically evaluate it, including its possible impact on inflation, a subject we will soon address?
As I am writing this column, we are still waiting for the Congressional Budget Office to score the Bill and tell us whether it is “paid for,” whatever that means. However, as we have discussed in this column, other “non-partisan” organizations have pointed out a number of things that will make the overall Bill much more expensive in the long run for taxpayers. These include that many of the programs provided for are now ending earlier than first proposed, with the hopes that once put in place they will be extended.
By now, I think that we have all learned that one of the principles that politicians and policy makers advocating for a new taxpayer-funded program operate under is that it’s hard to take something away from people once they have been given it, especially if they are not the ones paying for it.
So there is that open question of paying for it if the Bill passes. We have talked before about whether a higher tax on corporations will result in those corporations passing on some or all of those increases to us in the form of higher prices for their goods or services. Then I finally saw a piece addressing the other questions that I have been asking about “paying for it,” which are, how are all of those billionaires going to react to the various increased taxes proposed to be levied upon them, and are some of the proposals even constitutional? Will some of them perhaps move outside of the United States, leaving other taxpayers to pick up some of the slack? At any rate, is there anyone left who doesn’t think that, directly or indirectly, we are all going to pay something for this spending in the future?
Another issue that is constantly in the news these days, as it should be, is inflation. By the way, when they are addressing the interplay between the proposed new federal spending and inflation with …….
Source: https://sports.yahoo.com/amphtml/personal-finance-john-ninfo-many-100114175.html