Elon Musk Warns About Lots of ‘Accounting Trickery’ in Biden’s Build Back Better
The roughly $2 trillion package, or the Build Back Better bill, carries the weight of Biden’s agenda across a wide range of policy sectors. The bill passed the House last month, and Democrats are hopeful that it will make it through the Senate before the holidays.
Tesla’s eccentric “techno king” Elon Musk continued on Wednesday his fight against Biden’s economic agenda, claiming that there is a lot of “accounting trickery” in the bill that the public is not being told about.
On Twitter, the entrepreneur shared the Penn Wharton Budget Model’s research on the budgetary implications of the bill in the short and long term.
“If “temporary” provisions in the Build Back Better Act become permanent, US national debt will increase by 24%!” Musk captioned the post.
According to the study, the Build Back Better Act, known in Congress as H.R. 5376, would raise spending by $2.1 trillion and revenue by $1.8 trillion during a 10-year budget window, resulting in a $274 billion deficit.
Moreover, according to the estimates, the bill, if enacted, would reduce GDP by 0.2% in 2050 “relative to the current law baseline.” And if all temporary measures in the bill are made permanent, total spending during the 10-year budget window would be $4.6 trillion.
“In this scenario, by 2050 federal debt increase by 24.4 percent and GDP would fall by 2.9 percent relative to current law,” the research reads.
Musk invited his followers to check out the illustrated spreadsheet study, summarizing on Twitter that “there is a lot of accounting trickery in this bill that isn’t being disclosed to the public.”
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The bill eliminates the 200,000-EV per-manufacturer restriction and raises the incentives from $12,500, with $4,500 of that available only if the electric vehicles are produced in unionized US factories. Musk, the CEO of the carmaker, has expressed dissatisfaction with that provision of the law, which he believes was lobbied by General Motors.
“There’s this idea that Tesla always gets subsidies, but it’s important to note that the vehicle purchase tax credit, that $7,500, Tesla stopped getting that like 2 years ago,” Musk said at Monday’s conference. “Everyone else, except for GM, still gets the federal tax credit. So all of our sales from this year and last year had nothing to do with the tax credit because we were no longer eligible because we made so many electric cars.”
He also stressed that Tesla produced about “two-thirds” of all electric vehicles in the country, and that his company “doesn’t need the $7,500 tax credit.”
Also at that conference, Musk claimed that the government should “get out of the way and not impede progress,” stressing that the government should function as a “referee” rather than a “player on the field.”
And on Tuesday, US Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg backed the Biden administration’s support for electric vehicles while speaking at a Wall Street Journal event.
“We think it’s very important to fund EV charging stations and to also make sure what’s in the next Build Back Better Act to buy down the price of electric vehicles,” Buttigieg said.
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