They don’t even call it the Inflation Reduction Act anymore

On Friday, CBS News reported:

Senate Dems announce they have the votes to pass Inflation Reduction Act

Today, CBS News reports:

Senate passes Democrats’ sweeping climate, health and tax bill, delivering win for Biden

Notice something missing from that second headline? Somewhere between Friday and today the words ‘Inflation Reduction Act’ disappeared.

They should never have been there in the first place. Announcing the bill, CBS News reported:

“This is fighting inflation,” Manchin said Sunday on “Face the Nation.” “This is all about the absolute horrible position that people are in now because of the inflation costs, whether it be gasoline, whether it be food pricing, whether it be energy pricing, and it’s around energy, mostly that’s driving these high inflation. This is going to take care of that.”

But, as I noted last week, nobody believed that.

Politico reported:

Democrats’ latest reboot of Build Back Better, specifically marketed to fight inflation, won’t actually do so until after the 2024 presidential election.

That’s the takeaway from a fresh analysis today, delivered by the budget experts at The University of Pennsylvania’s business school.

In fact:

…the new budget modeling predicts the package Democrats are trying to pass along party lines “would very slightly increase inflation until 2024 and decrease inflation thereafter.”

Define ‘slightly’: The inflation impact would be incredibly minor and “statistically indistinguishable from zero,” the report says. So the budget analysts have “low confidence” that the package will have any impact on prices at all.

Even a favorable analysis by Moody’s Analytics which argued that the plan “will nudge the economy and inflation in the right direction” found, according to Business Insider, that:

The overall impact on price growth will be limited, however. Moody’s expects the IRA to only lower the Consumer Price Index — a popular gauge of overall inflation — by 0.33% by the fourth quarter of 2031, according to the note.

The impact will be “marginal” through the middle of the 2020s but become more “meaningful” later in the decade, the team added.

To put that “meaningful” 0.33% decline in the CPI by 2031 in context, it increased by 1.0% in May alone.

The notion that this rag bag of spending proposals would do anything to lower inflation was such an obvious lie that its supporters quickly found that they could fool almost none of the people almost none of the time: indeed, only 21% of Democrats believe that the Inflation Reduction Act would reduce inflation:

Even Bernie Sanders refused to play along:

So the bill’s backers stopped pretending. The inflation language was dropped and the bill was marketed more honestly, as just another multi-billion dollar spending splurge:

Americans struggling with inflation will get no help whatsoever from this bill. At least its supporters have finally stopped pretending that they would.