#Biden's Inflation Reduction Act reaps benefits

[intelligentchristianlady]

And yet again the Republicans are proved wrong.

[probablyasocialecologist]

Why, after every electoral loss, is the left always the scapegoat? It’s easier to blame activists for pushing a progressive agenda than confront the real issue: the Democratic Party has long been shaped by far more powerful forces—corporate interests, lobbyists, and consultants—whose influence has neglected the real crises facing everyday Americans. We see this cycle again and again. Contrary to establishment narratives, the Democratic leadership has often resisted advocacy organizations pushing for bold reforms on immigration, Big Tech, climate, debt, healthcare, rent, mass incarceration, Palestinian rights, and for policies like the Build Back Better agenda. This tension isn’t just about differing priorities—it reveals the actual balance of forces in the party. Corporate donors on Wall Street and Silicon Valley pour billions into campaigns, shaping agendas to suit their interests. A consultant class reaps millions from flawed strategies and failed candidates yet continues to fail upward, perpetuating a pattern of mediocrity. They, not progressives, are the roadblock preventing Democrats from becoming a populist force that could disrupt the status quo and win back voters of all stripes. It was these elements within the party that kneecapped the Democrats’ most ambitious efforts to help ordinary Americans. The Biden administration entered with huge plans, notably Build Back Better, which would have delivered immediate relief: expanded child tax credits, free community college, universal child care and pre-K, paid leave, and more. Progressives pushed mightily for Build Back Better to pass. It was centrist obstruction—namely Senators Manchin and Sinema—that blocked those policies. The result was a patchwork of long-term measures like the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal, whose benefits won’t be felt until 2025 at the earliest, if at all. By failing to pass Build Back Better, Democrats lost the chance to deliver easy-to-understand, tangible economic benefits and solidify their image as the party of working people. And it was corporate Democrats—particularly lobbyists like Harris’s brother-in-law, former Uber executive Tony West, and David Plouffe—who held the most sway over Harris’s campaign. They advised her to cozy up to ultra-wealthy celebrities, Liz and Dick Cheney, and Mark Cuban, and avoid populist rhetoric that could have distanced her from the corporate elites who dominate the party. In 2024, the biggest spenders in Democratic Party politics weren’t progressives—it was AIPAC, cryptocurrency PACs, and corporate giants like Uber, all of whom poured millions into Democratic campaigns without regard for public opinion or the will of the people.

18 November 2024

[justinspoliticalcorner]

David Lurie at Public Notice:

For months, Trump campaign operatives have said they want their candidate to “stick to his economic policies.” Trump supporters have repeated that shibboleth even more lately as their candidate continues to shed the GOP’s typically large and reliable large polling advantage on economic issues.  Trump held a 12 point polling advantage over Biden on “the economy” in 2020 and had a lead of as high as 22 percent only months ago, but his lead over Harris on the economy may now only be five or six points and is likely still shrinking.    Contrary to the received wisdom, Trump’s problem is not that he speaks too little about his economic policies — it’s that his policies would be undeniably bad for the economy and for working Americans. And the more voters learn about what Trump is planning to do, the worse it is for him. 

This intractable problem stands to become even more serious for Trump as voters learn more about Vice President Harris’s policies, which actually speak to the concerns and needs of working people and families. Trump has been a clear and constant exponent of his economic program, which can be boiled down to three proposals. First, impose massive, and hugely inflationary, tariffs on imported goods, which will hit consumers directly in the pocketbook. Second, massively cut taxes, again, for the wealthy. And, finally, the mass round up of and deportation of immigrants, including those playing crucial roles in the growing economy. Trump never hesitates to advocate this three pronged “economic policy” during his rallies, and as he did (over and over) yesterday during a two hour “speech” before the Detroit Economic Club. The problem is that — outside of the xenophobes who constitute his hardcore base and the mega-wealthy bankrolling his super PACs — Trump’s proposals hardly resonate as a prescription for making the American economy better for most Americans.

These are not new ideas, and they have already been political failures. Trump’s sole major economic legislative “success” during his presidency was passing a historically regressive tax cut bill that increased income inequality while ballooning the deficit. To the chagrin of the GOP, which was used to reaping political benefits from tax cuts, the public smelled a rat and punished Republicans at the polls in the 2018 midterms for Trump’s giveaway to the rich. For many months of the current campaign, the politically problematic nature of Trump’s economic “program” was obscured by the focus on inflation. But as inflation has receded, Republicans increasingly have had to face the question of whether an economic policy that is substantially comprised of strategies that have failed politically before can be made into a winner by the “populist” Trump ticket. While it may have escaped the notice of the mainstream press, the weakness of Trump’s economic policy proposals was on full display during the recent vice presidential debate between Tim Walz and JD Vance. Instead of defending the actual MAGA agenda during the debate, Vance sounded more like the champion of government intervention on behalf of the disenfranchised he claimed to be before his cynical conversion to the Trump cult.

[...]

Trump wants to peddle hate, not discuss economic policy

The economic policy problem for the Trump campaign made evident by Vance’s debate performance is only becoming more obvious as we approach the final weeks of the campaign and the candidates spend more and more time in the industrial Midwest, which has been a singular focus of the Biden administration’s infrastructure and industrial development initiatives.

As Greg Sargent has detailed, Vance and Trump have been doubling down on their opposition to the hundreds of billions of dollars in tax credits, loans, and grants resulting from Biden/Harris initiatives, including the Inflation Reduction Act. Large portions of those funds are headed to the industrial Midwest, where thousands of new jobs are being created in clean energy manufacturing. Economic development of this sort is particularly crucial to the future of the Michigan-centered US automotive industry, which — as Trump himself acknowledges — is at risk of ceding electric automobile manufacturing (the undisputed future of the industry) to China. The Detroit News revealed that some people seen wearing “Auto Workers for Trump” shirts behind Vance at a recent Michigan rally were not autoworkers. That episode served as a reminder of when Trump — a staunch opponent of organized labor who has boasted during recent speeches about stiffing employees who worked for him — held an event at a non-union plant during the UAW strike before non-union workers holding signs reading “union members for Trump.”

The economy, which the Republicans have historically led on, has been chipped away at by the Harris/Walz ticket.

[arpov-blog-blog]

"When reminded about it, 7 in 10 Americans say in polls that they support President Joe Biden’s landmark climate and social spending law, the Inflation Reduction Act. But only about half of the country has ever heard “a lot” or even “some” about it.

A new $1.4 million advertising campaign in Michigan and Wisconsin aims to change that for voters in the two key battleground states.

TV spots set to air over the next three weeks on local channels in Milwaukee and in Michigan’s Grand Rapids and Flint areas pitch the Biden administration’s legislative cornerstone as the spark for a new manufacturing boom in a region long devastated by outsourcing.

Passed without a single Republican vote in 2022, the law pumped hundreds of billions of dollars ― by some projections, potentially trillions ― in the form of federal tax credits and subsidies into building out a domestic economy for green energy and competing directly with China. The legislation spurred what may be the dawn of a manufacturing renaissance in the U.S.: With hundreds of clean energy projects and factories to make electric car batteries and solar panels announced since Biden signed the law, federal data shows that manufacturers’ spending on construction has doubled and the U.S. has added nearly 1 million new manufacturing jobs.

So far, Republican-dominated states have reaped the biggest benefits, yet even Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp ― a Republican whose state has become a magnet for federally backed green-energy investments ― said as recently as March that former President Donald Trump, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, would “be better than Joe Biden.”

Paid for by Evergreen Collaborative, a climate group founded by alumni of Washington Gov. Jay Inslee’s ill-fated but influential campaign for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, the ads offer a starkly different gubernatorial viewpoint.

The Democratic governors of Michigan and Wisconsin, who both won reelection against Republican challengers in 2022 and now enjoy higher approval ratings than Biden, appear in the ads. Trump won both states in 2016 and lost them in 2020, but polls now show the former president tied with or ahead of Biden. With Trump still polling strong despite a felony conviction, Biden’s best chance of defeating Trump in the Electoral College depends on winning both Midwestern states.

In a 30-second spot, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, clad in a stylish black jacket, speaks to the camera from a shop floor where two workers in T-shirts assemble equipment and another welds in the background. Accompanied by pounding rock music and the governor’s narration, we see scenes of General Motors’ electric pickup trucks and Biden trotting out on stage between battery-powered SUVs at the Detroit Auto Show."

[shahananasrin-blog]

[ad_1] NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles! It has been one year since Joe Biden and Congressional Democrats passed their signature Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) – a disastrous law that did nothing to address inflation and is now confirmed to have added hundreds of billions to the deficit. President Biden himself, in a recent, rare moment of candor, even said he wishes he had named the IRA something different since it "has less to do with reducing inflation." Nevertheless, working families are paying the price for that law while the wealthy and well-connected continue to reap its benefits. As hard-earned taxpayer dollars from the IRA go into the pockets of billion-dollar corporations and big banks, inflation continues to steal from workers’ paychecks. One year in, it is clear that what is needed today is relief for the working class and Main Street businesses – something the IRA will never provide.BIDEN ADMITS INFLATION REDUCTION ACT HAD 'LESS TO DO WITH REDUCING INFLATION' THAN HE ORIGINALLY SAIDThe so-called "green" special interest tax breaks passed in the IRA are now estimated by the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) to cost over $650 billion, 240% higher than originally projected. This money will flow primarily to big business and Wall Street. JCT has confirmed that 90 percent of these tax credits go to pad the pockets of large corporations with sales of a billion dollars or more. As a matter of fact, Democrats rewrote the rules of these credits to make them more easily transferred to the wealthy. Financial institutions will take in three times as much of these tax benefits as any other industry. So, while the president talks big about the wealthy "paying their fair share," his policies pay for the lifestyles of the wealthy and well-connected.To make matters worse, the Biden administration’s implementation of these tax credits fails to secure our supply chains for critical minerals and sends taxpayer dollars to adversarial nations like China. For example, the electric vehicle credit will not only cost 7 times as much as Democrats originally claimed but will also require that less critical mineral and battery components be sourced and made in America. MANCHIN BACKTRACKS, DOWNPLAYS INVOLVEMENT IN INFLATION REDUCTION ACT AFTER CLAIMING HE 'WROTE' ITThis means there will be no reshoring of our critical supply chains from this law. Additionally, the Brookings Institution confirmed that 73 percent of electric vehicle (EV) owners covered by the IRA’s $7,500 EV tax credit would have purchased those vehicles anyway.At the same time, American companies who are cashing in on these credits are also funneling tax dollars to foreign countries like China. Ford, for example, is using the IRA’s special interest tax credits to hire Chinese workers at a Michigan plant as part of its newly announced partnership with a Chinese company that is clearly under the influence of the Chinese Communist Party, and which allegedly has a history of using forced labor. Bottom line: Democrats and President Biden are keeping America dependent on the Chinese Communist Party and willing to look the other way on supposed bipartisan concern for global human rights issues when it comes to their extremist environmental agenda.The implementation of this law has been so bad even members of the president’s own party have called him out, with Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., the architect of the IRA, calling it a "betrayal." These special interest tax breaks will undoubtedly expand China’s dominance over America’s energy and critical supply chains. The United States cannot afford to put the left’s radical green agenda over our national security – much less our entire economy. CLICK HERE FOR MORE FOX NEWS OPINIONRather than spending $650 billion in tax subsidies for the wealthy and corporate elite, Congress must look at policies that build upon the American economic renewal resulting from the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA). TCJA delivered tangible results for the working class. Following its passage, the lowest earners saw the greatest benefit, with their wages increasing at a 50 percent higher rate than those with higher incomes. Those same earners saw their federal tax rate fall to its lowest level in 40 years as people making less than $100,000 a year received on average a 16 percent tax cut. Unfortunately, the president remains dead set on drowning the middle class in higher prices at the grocery store and gas pump. At the same time, he is targeting American energy producers with higher taxes, he insists, contrary to all evidence, that workers and families are actually benefiting from his failed economic agenda – the same agenda that has produced the highest spike in prices and the largest increase in interest rates in a generation. For the entirety of President Biden’s first two years in office, inflation outpaced wage growth. Prior to his presidency, that had happened for only two months in the previous nine years. While Americans struggle with high prices and watch their retirement savings shrink, the Biden administration has been doing backflips to spin the data – proudly branding their agenda of handouts to the wealthy and well-connected as "Bidenomics."CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APPIronically, the president’s namesake agenda is entirely divorced from the study of economics and doubles down on its worst elements. Moreover, it disrespects American taxpayers struggling to makes ends meet and provide for their families by funneling their hard-earned dollars into the pockets of the wealthy, Wall Street, large corporations, and the Chinese Communist Party. Maybe President Biden should spend less time talking about economics and more time studying it before taxpayers see even more of their money flow to the rich and politically connected. Republican Jason Smith represents Missouri's 8th Congressional District and is Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. [ad_2]

[hbclife]

Consumers may qualify for up to $10,000 — or more — in climate tax breaks and rebates in the Inflation Reduction Act

Consumers may qualify for up to $10,000 — or more — in climate tax breaks and rebates in the Inflation Reduction Act

Getty Images The Inflation Reduction Act, passed by House Democrats on Friday and headed to President Joe Biden’s desk for his signature, is the most ambitious climate spending package in U.S. history — and households that take steps to improve their energy efficiency stand to reap financial benefits. The package would pump $369 billion into measures to fight climate change, boost energy…