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Last updated Nov 29, 2025
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Sacks @ 01:17:06Wrong
economygovernment
If the enhanced ACA (Obamacare) subsidies extended for three years in the Inflation Reduction Act are renewed instead of sunsetting after those three years, the IRA will increase the federal deficit by roughly $155 billion over its 10‑year scoring window instead of reducing it by about $305 billion.
if you extend that subsidy three years from now, just that one item alone makes the deficit reduction in this bill go from $305 billion over the ten year period to -155 billion. So just that one item, if you continue it and don't sunset it, just that one thing makes this a hugely deficit not reducing bill but deficit increasing bill.View on YouTube
Explanation

Budget and policy analyses indicate that Sacks’s conditional claim about the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) math is not supported.

  1. Baseline IRA deficit reduction. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) estimated that the IRA as passed would reduce federal deficits by about $305 billion over 10 years (roughly 2022–2031). (crfb.org)

  2. What credible analysts said about permanently extending the ACA subsidies. CRFB explicitly modeled the case Sacks was talking about: assume the enhanced ACA subsidies are made permanent instead of temporary. Their memo reports that under this assumption, the IRA would still reduce deficits by about $155 billion over the decade, not increase deficits by $155 billion. In other words, permanent subsidies shrink the deficit reduction from ~$305b to ~$155b; they do not flip it to a $155b deficit increase. (crfb.org) This directly contradicts Sacks’s statement that “just that one item” would take the bill from –$305b (deficit reduction) to +$155b (deficit increase).

  3. Later CBO scoring of a permanent extension. More recent CBO/JCT analysis of the Biden administration’s plan to make the enhanced ACA subsidies permanent estimates that such a policy would increase federal deficits by about $335 billion over 2025–2034, plus roughly $48 billion in extra interest costs (around $383b total). (budget.house.gov) Even if you crudely overlay that on the original IRA score, it implies at most a relatively modest net deficit increase over ten years, nowhere near the roughly $460 billion swing (from –$305b to +$155b) that Sacks asserted.

  4. The conditional event hasn’t even happened yet. As of November 30, 2025, the enhanced ACA subsidies extended by the IRA are still scheduled to expire at the end of 2025; Congress has debated but not enacted another extension. (commonwealthfund.org) So Sacks’s antecedent (that the three‑year extension is renewed instead of sunsetting) has not occurred. But even in the modeled scenario where it does occur, the best available budget estimates do not match his claim.

Because both contemporaneous and later official budget analyses show that making the enhanced ACA subsidies permanent would at most substantially reduce the IRA’s deficit savings and, in some estimates, still leave it deficit‑reducing rather than turning it into a bill that increases the deficit by about $155 billion, Sacks’s prediction about the fiscal effect of renewing the subsidies is wrong.