Biden: Build Back Better Budget Costs Zero

BUCK: The Biden administration thinks that they’re still gonna get through this major spending package and the Build Back Better agenda and all this other stuff that they’re talking about — including climate, as if we’re supposed to be really focused in on that.

BIDEN: You know, we need more — stronger levees, stronger power grids, more durable, able to withstand ever increasing ferocity and intensity of extreme weather. Any road used to be you have a catastrophe and the road gets washed out, you build it back to what it was before. You can’t build it back to the same standard. You’ve got to build the road back literally higher. Not a joke. Because the weather has already changed. And if we don’t do something before we reach 1.5 degrees Celsius, we’re in trouble.

BUCK: Clay, this whole thing about the proof of climate change all around us from fires and weather and storms and tornadoes, weather is not more severe. This is just not true. We keep going through this. They say it and then the actual data shows they’re making it up as they go along. I feel like the Biden administration’s floundering because what exactly are they selling people on at this point?

CLAY: Well, also Joe is trying to sell people on something he doesn’t really believe in himself, right? There’s no way that Joe Biden is sitting around and feels like climate change is an existential threat to American life. That’s what he says because he’s trying to placate the far left wing of his party now. But that’s gotta be one of the great disappointments I would imagine of Joe Biden’s life. It’s amazing to get elected president, but he managed to do it after his mental faculties were gone and when no one cares what he thinks. So he’s not leading anything. He’s being dragged along like I said Weekend at Bernie’s style, and as a result we are ending up in a situation where he’s not leading his party at all. In fact, he’s just trying to avoid becoming target of his party. I think the big story about Sinema and Manchin is he’s happy to have them be the bad guys instead of people being mad at him.

BUCK: And the way they’re trying to sell this, too, first of all, that weather is so much more severe and that’s why we need it, that’s just not true. It’s like masks for kids in school, it’s like so much better. It’s just not true. But his one is truly mind-blowing. So what I said before but we know it’s a lie, we know it’s a lie but we are supposed to go along with the line that everyone knows is such, here he is still saying the $5 trillion Build Back Better bill, well, what does it cost?

BIDEN: And the cost of the Build Back Better bill in terms of adding to the deficit is zero, zero, zero. Because we’re gonna pay for it all. In addition to the that, half it has is a tax cut. It’s not spending money. It’s a tax cut for working-class people.

BUCK: This is Joe Biden telling the American people that he has invented a magic doughnut —

CLAY: Free lunch.

BUCK: — that you can eat endlessly, that never runs out, that costs you nothing and that will not make you fat. I’m sorry, I’m not buying it.

CLAY: Well, and again, I don’t even think Joe Biden buys it, and the media should be pushing back. I mean the cost of something is not zero. I mean, it’s basically Biden trying to argue that he’s creating a free lunch which, you know, economically does not ever exist. And we’re talking about taking money directly out of people’s pockets. Many of you out there listening to us, including your radio show hosts, and putting it into the federal government.

And, by the way, a great editorial in the Wall Street Journal this morning — I know you read it, too, Buck — saying that what they’re basically trying to do now is they’re going to stuff as much as they can into this bill and claim that it only costs X-number of dollars because they sunset the provisions and don’t count it into the future, when it adds real tens of trillions of dollars in additional costs in the years ahead, they’re trying to sneak this in now with the idea being it will be hard to eliminate in the years ahead, which has been the case with many different entitlements that now are eating up the vast majority of our budget.

BUCK: This is very straightforward, too. If these were such grade ideas they had in this massive bill, they would take each really compelling idea that the American people so strongly agree with, they’d put it forward. They’d say we want to spend, you know, a hundred billion dollars on climate change weatherproofing or whatever, and they’d put it out there and everybody would vote and we would see. Do you believe in this lunacy or not, members of Congress? But no. Instead they try to just push through this unwieldy monstrosity full of whatever and then they just pick one or two things, they lie and say that it costs zero and they’re just hoping to essentially redistribute a whole lot of money to favored constituencies and special interests and, of course, the welfare state and then tell everybody what a great job they’re doing. That’s the plan.

CLAY: That’s the plan for 2022. And we hope it’s gonna fail not only in 2022 but in the election in Virginia in a couple of weeks.