The Speaker of the House crammed through the "Build Back Better" bill this week. There is nothing "better" about this bill. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office says the 2,100 page bill will cost more than $4 trillion and add at least $367 billion to the deficit over the next ten years. There are so many problems with this terrible bill, but here are a few of the worst sections:
• It includes new incentives for illegal immigration: It includes amnesty for up to 10 million illegal immigrants and offers them over 100 billion in taxpayer funded benefits. For example, illegal immigrants would be eligible for federal student aid and the enhanced child tax credit. Can you imagine what that is going to do to our border crisis?
• It makes it easier for the IRS to target taxpayers: Creates an $80 billion slush fund to hire an 87,000-IRS-agent army that would be used to carry out the Biden administration’s plan to review every account with more than $10,000 worth of transactions in a year (This applies to all Americans who spend at least $30 per day on average). I certainly don’t think we need to be exponentially increasing the IRS.
• It perpetuates the labor shortage by continuing welfare benefits without work requirements for able-bodied adults without dependents at a time where there are 10.4 million job openings— We have more openings than there are people looking for work.
• The most costly provision in the bill isn’t to help Veterans, seniors, children or working class Americans. It is a tax break for the top 1% of Americans. The bill increases the cap on state and local tax (SALT) deductibility. 90% of Americans don’t itemize their taxes and won’t see one dollar of savings from this costly provision.
• It will drive up costs on Americans’ utility bills because it includes a tax on natural gas, up to $1,500 per ton, that could cost the American economy an estimated $9.1 billion and eliminate 90,000 American jobs. This will have a negative impact on all Americans who consume electricity, not just those making over $400,000 annually as the White House claims.
• It includes a $2.5 billion slush fund, sending tax dollars to radical environmental groups to plant trees and advance “tree equity.” I’m not even certain I know what tree equity even means.
• It includes innovation-killing Socialist Price Controls by instituting a government price-setting of prescription drugs which has shown to be likely to lead to significantly decreased private investment in new cures.
• It spends $2.5 billion for “Community-based Violence Intervention initiatives” which could be used to deny individuals the exercise of the 2nd Amendment without due process.
• It weakens our position by increasing energy dependence on OPEC, Russia and China: The bill includes mineral and energy withdrawals on federal lands and overturns provisions included in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that authorized energy production in the Arctic that will result in 130,000 Americans losing their jobs and $440 billion in lost federal revenue
• It increases out of pocket costs for those who rely on prescription drugs: The bill will repeal the Trump-era Rebate Rule which passes through rebates directly to consumers at the point of sale, and
• It also removes Hyde protections that keep your tax dollars from paying for abortions.
This package does nothing to help fix our current problems. It will only make them worse. I pray that some common sense will prevail in the United States Senate. It seems as though this Administration will not rest until they control every aspect of our lives: from decisions about our finances, healthcare, energy consumption, and the education of our children. It is one attack after another on these basic individual freedoms- many of which are included in this radical spending package.
Let your senators know the American people do not want to be controlled by the government further by voting no on this bill.