Congress is poised to pass legislation that will implement important President-related provisions. Joe Biden’sInitiative Build Back better. A number of core provisions such as universal pre-K and expanded child care would allow Americans to make significant progress in easing their path to work and increasing opportunity. It is crucial to invest in education, healthcare, housing and the care economy to reduce the social damage caused by inequality and also to lower the economic cost of current imbalance.

Some people question the value of Build Back better and raise concerns about its cost. While I understand the concerns about affordability, I believe we can still afford it.

The Congressional Budget Office will be grading this legislation within the next days and lawmakers might need to make adjustments in order to improve the margins. Some would set the bar even higher by making speculation projections about how a future Congress might extend temporary policies and not increase revenue or reduce spending. This would be an error.

My entire career was spent trying to ensure that the United States budget works for people who are struggling to meet their financial obligations. This often required finding ways to reduce spending and increase revenue. When I was Director of the Office of Management and Budget in the 1990s, we balanced the budget — not for one year, but for three in a row — while expanding health-care coverage to millions of kids as part of the Balanced Budget Agreement.

The nation has taken a new fiscal path since that time. Successive tax cuts for the wealthiest individuals added to our deficits, and so too did spending on crisis response — appropriately so — and other priorities. In the most challenging days of the Covid-19 financial crisis, I supported the increase in debt as an emergency aid to families and businesses. This was to help spur recovery. It was a wise decision, as evidenced by the significant declines in poverty and economic rebound that ensued.

However, it is important to pay for long-term investment like the Build Back better Act. This is what the current legislation does. The bill raises revenue via modest tax changes as well as funding the Internal Revenue Service for enforcement of our tax laws. Everybody, not just wealthy Americans, must follow the same rules that working people and file all their income taxes. Annual revenue of $600 billion would increase if all reported income were included in tax returns. This tax gap is unfair and expensive. The IRS experts and the Treasury Department agreed that new revenue will likely exceed conservative congressional estimates. It will also restore equality so that those who follow tax laws do not have a disadvantage over those who cheat.

However, Congress has allowed temporary programs to expire even though many of its members supported extension. The main issue in the ongoing debate about these spending measures has been how to finance them. With future demographic and fiscal pressures, it is likely that the pendulum will swing back to at least pay for new spending.

Important policies such as child care should be extended. I do hope they are. I also believe that they will be paid for. There remains ample low-hanging fruit in the tax policies proposed by the administration that are not included in the pending legislation — from modestly raising individual, corporate, or capital gains rates to preventing capital gains from being passed from generation to generation without ever being taxed. Future Congresses will have many options for extending these policies to make our economy stronger, more just and fair.

Biden was elected to office in 2008 and now governs as someone who will go against the grain and establish a precedent that new initiatives must be funded after all emergency spending has ended. That standard could have applied to tax cuts only a few decades ago. This would have made our country have $2 trillion more fiscal room, which would be especially valuable during the Covid crisis. Today, Congress and the Administration are working together to fund policies that are urgently needed.

While the package was reduced over time, revenue and spending have also been decreased. However, it is still the case that deficits beyond what the CBO considers to be 10 years will not increase.

The question of whether the current Build Back better spending has been paid for is a legitimate one. A future Congress will have to look for revenues or savings in order to pay back the additional expenditures when it considers whether to increase provisions. Build Back Better is a good example of a program that can be evaluated for its own merits. Is it going to make America more equal and better? How much has it cost? Both are true, in my opinion.

—Jacob J. Lew, U.S. Treasury Secretary from 2013-2017