Democrats sold the Build Back Better 'fully funded' lie based on budget gimmicks

In nearly every section of the Build Back Better bill, Democrats had been forced to hide programs’ true costs to evade scoring constraints that impose budget balance.

Thank goodness. Manchin’s demands imposed a $1.75 trillion cap on the bill’s overall footprint. But Democrats hoped that this budget constraint was merely a talking point rather than a real limit on their spending ambitions. Instead of cutting programs out of their bill, they aimed to hide the real costs of their full agenda, hoping that through manipulation of the budget scoring rules they could squeeze nearly $5 trillion of actual spending into a $1.75 trillion budget scoring straitjacket.