By Ian Hanchett
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On Wednesday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Steve Rattner, who served as counselor to the Treasury Secretary in the Obama administration, and currently serves as the show’s Economic Analyst, acknowledged that, according to estimates by both the government and the private sector, the green provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act are going to cost hundreds of billions of dollars more than originally estimated.
Rattner said, “So, the way this was set up, it was mostly a bunch of tax credits and people could apply for tax credits if they had a project they felt was economic. And not surprisingly…they have been applying for these tax credits in droves. And we see this in our own investing, projects that didn’t make great economic sense before the tax credits are now economic. And so, you can see that originally, again, the Congressional Budget Office thought that this provision would cost $390 billion over a decade. They have since revised it to 570. You have some private sector forecasters saying it’s more like 780 or 1.2 trillion even in the case of Goldman Sachs. But, again, this is good news in the sense that people are using this program, they’re doing what they’re supposed to in terms of building facilities. And, yes, so we’re going to spend a little bit more money on it.”