Progressives are finally admitting they’ll have to trim the top-line cost of their reconciliation bill to a number closer to Sen. Joe Manchin’s ceiling of $1.5 trillion. But reality still hasn’t sunk in enough that they’re willing to kill any new entitlement programs.

Their thinking was on display in force on Sunday. Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal told CNN that the left is focused on “what is the way that we can get all of the critical programs that we had identified [child care, paid leave] . . . but perhaps for...

Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal speaks to reporters outside of the U.S. Capitol on Sept. 23.

Photo: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

Progressives are finally admitting they’ll have to trim the top-line cost of their reconciliation bill to a number closer to Sen. Joe Manchin’s ceiling of $1.5 trillion. But reality still hasn’t sunk in enough that they’re willing to kill any new entitlement programs.

Their thinking was on display in force on Sunday. Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal told CNN that the left is focused on “what is the way that we can get all of the critical programs that we had identified [child care, paid leave] . . . but perhaps for a shorter period of time, and be able to get then to the number from that.”

California Rep. Ro Khanna told Fox News that Democrats are looking to simply “front-load the benefits and have less years.”

Added New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on CBS’s “Face the Nation”: “Washington math is notoriously funny . . . You can make a one-trillion-dollar bill into two trillion.” She explained: “I think that one of the ideas that is out there is fully fund what we can fully fund, but maybe instead of doing it for 10 years, you fully fund it for five years.”

Progressives know that entitlements, once created, are almost impossible to repeal. The real sticker shock will come later, after the programs are on autopilot. As White House senior adviser Cedric Richmond vowed on Fox, they’ll come “back in 2025, 2026, or any other year” to “fight” for their renewal.

Consider the allowance of $3,000 to $3,600 per child. The payments cost some $110 billion a year, making its 10-year price tag about $1.1 trillion. But Democrats hid the cost in their Ways and Means tax bill by pretending the allowance will end after 2025. Democrats will accuse Republicans of raising taxes on families if the GOP ever tries to end it.

Or take the bill’s accounting for its child-care program, which runs on paper through 2027. The bill provides three years of fixed funding ($90 billion) for the states, but starting in fiscal 2025 opens the entitlement spigots to “such sums as may be necessary” to run the program through its (fictitious) end date.

Democrats likewise mask the price of their universal pre-K entitlement by annually shifting more of its cost to the states. Similar ploys cloak the real costs of paid family leave, free community college, and expanded Medicaid and Medicare.

Each of these entitlements carries explosive price tags, and an honest accounting would require Democrats to cut entire programs to meet Mr. Manchin’s limit. Yet Ms. Jayapal this weekend rejected Mr. Manchin’s $1.5 trillion (“not going to happen”), which suggests progressives know there are limits to what even they can disguise under that amount.

As this debate unfolds, the programs are more important to watch than the top-line budget number. Democrats can and will game the latter to make everything look less costly than it is. Once these programs are in place, the real cost will be many, many trillions of dollars, and taxpayers will pay for decades to come.