NANCY PELOSI’S TERRIBLE, HORRIBLE, NO GOOD, VERY BAD WEEK: Pelosi’s Little Big Horn.
Democrats have discovered something worse than having a septuagenarian as president: having an octogenarian as House speaker.
Nancy Pelosi just suffered a week from hell. (Unkind people would say a taste of her future.)
First, Joe Manchin stopped if only temporarily her party’s Only Fans donors spendathon. In response, the AOC (Already Openly Communist) Crowd stopped the bipartisan Only Everyone’s Donors spendathon.
Related: The Left Loses Another Messaging War.
Having spent months searing the number $3.5 trillion into American minds, however, Democrats have suddenly made a 180-degree turn to the idea that this gargantuan spending bill will actually cost nothing at all.
This week, Joe Biden contended that his agenda actually “costs zero dollars.” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi picked up the baton: “It’s not about a dollar amount,” she said, “the dollar amount, as the president said, is zero. This bill will be paid for.” This new tactic is both economically illiterate and strategically unsound.
The White House’s new contention is that there is no “cost” to this mammoth proposal because it would add nothing to the national debt. That is nonsense, of course. No independent analysis supports the Democratic Party’s largely conjectural claim. It is only feasible insofar as it relies on the idea that economic growth will offset its costs, and a future Congress may turn off the spending spigot this bill would unleash. If Democrats were so secure in its projections, its members would not have conspicuously avoided submitting their plan to the Congressional Budget Office to determine its impact on the debt and deficit before they hope to vote on it.
The is the ultimate outcome of Bill Clinton’s Orwellian attempt starting in 1992 to conflate spending taxpayer money with “investments.”
More: This headline won’t do much for Pelosi’s blood pressure: Sinema, a holdout on the social spending bill, returns to Arizona for a doctor’s visit and a scheduled fund-raiser.
Finally, from America’s Newspaper of Record: Congress Members To Wear Barcodes So Lobbyists Can Scan Prices, Self-Checkout.
It certainly would speed up the process.