Fact Check: 4 Blatantly False Biden Administration Claims About Inflation and His ‘Build Back Better’ Boondoggle

The House on Friday passed a profoundly radical, multitrillion-dollar tax-and-spend package, with all but one Democrat in favor and all Republicans opposed.

Though the bill has been given the innocuous-sounding name “Build Back Better,” it would cause tremendous long-term damage to our way of life.

More immediately, it would pose a grave threat to our economic recovery by worsening price inflation.

Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, the federal government has flooded the economy with more than $5 trillion in deficit spending. Much of the spending has been wasted or used to benefit politically connected special interests.

All that deficit spending has been a factor in America’s most significant bout of inflation in decades, and families are feeling the adverse effects.

Rather than heeding the warning of the raging inflationary fire and backing away from the reckless spending plan, the administration has rolled out a series of flawed talking points in an effort to prop up President Joe Biden’s dismal approval ratings.

Claim: “We must pass the Build Back Better Act to lower costs for working families … .”
Response: When most people think about “lower costs,” they imagine the price of something going down. When the Biden administration says “lower costs,” it means the federal government subsidizing a few politically favored causes.

In the real world, more federal intervention would backfire in several ways.

Claim: “[I]t’s not going to cost anything for the American taxpayer.”
Response: The Biden administration has been serving up this whopper for months.

For starters, the bill would slap heavy taxes on businesses and investors and would hire an army of IRS agents to shake America down even harder.

In addition, the idea that trillions of dollars in spending and tax credits have “zero cost” is patently absurd. We all know that every penny the federal government spends has to come from somewhere.

If it’s taxed, money is taken out of the economy. If it’s borrowed, money comes from future taxpayers, many of whom aren’t even old enough to vote yet. Borrowing also crowds out private investment.

Claim: “[T]his bill is fully paid for. It’s not going to add to inflationary pressures—quite the opposite.”
Response: Here, a Biden spokesman acknowledges that deficit spending is inflationary. He also claims that the bill’s tax hikes are enough to pay for the spending and tax credits, and thus claims that the bill wouldn’t make inflation worse.

There are three big problems with what he said.

Claim: “ … Build Back Better will ease inflationary pressures and lower costs for working families.”
Response: This, and a related claim that Nobel Prize-winning economists think the bill would reduce inflation, stem from an open letter published in September at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.

Specifically, the letter claims that an earlier version of the legislation would “ease longer-term inflationary pressures.”

Setting aside the merits of the claim, these economists aren’t saying that the bill would address the inflation that Americans are actually dealing with right now.

As such, the administration’s repeated (and often obscured) references to the letter in the context of inflation are an attempt to confuse the public about what the letter actually says.

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