Coal industry leaders blast Manchin for supporting a bill that threatens to kill their industry
The Daily Wire takes up the mantle of the coal miners of West Virginia when the state’s senator refused to do so.
Coal industry leaders blasted Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) for his agreement with Democratic leadership on a climate and tax-focused reconciliation bill that they say would “severely threaten” the industry.
In a statement Wednesday, America’s State Coal Associations, a group of eight state trade organizations in the coal industry, blistered Manchin for endorsing the so-called “Inflation Reduction Act.” The group said that Manchin’s support for the package, which has been lauded by the Biden administration and praised by climate activists like Biden’s climate czar John Kerry, leads the coal industry to question the “motivation and sincerity” of Manchin’s interest in protecting fossil fuels.
“The more you read and digest the provisions found in over 700+ pages of legislative digest, the more it becomes abundantly clear this legislation will serve to severely threaten American coal and the $261 Billion of annual revenues that it produces for the nation’s overall economy and attendant 381,000 American jobs,” the coal associations wrote.
“This legislation is so egregious, it leaves those of us that call Senator Manchin a friend, shocked and disheartened. Senator Manchin has seemingly fought against numerous climate measures advanced over the past year by the national democratic establishment insisting that America’s Coal assets be protected and allowed to continue to operate as carbon reduction strategies are developed and proven to be effective within reasonable cost and performance parameters. The current Schumer-Manchin draft agreement on climate and energy frankly leaves us questioning the motivation and sincerity of Manchin’s previous stance and his repeated chant: we must ‘Innovate not eliminate.’”
(Read more at the Daily Wire)
Truthfully, I am surprised at the weak response to Biden from my own industry
Outside of a few industry organs, there have been limited responses to Biden’s strangling of the energy sector.
That surprises me.
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We have key weaknesses in the Inflation Reduction Act (aka the Manchin-Schumer bill)
The Washington Examiner points out the key weaknesses of the Manchin-Schumer bill (formerly the Biden Green New Deal).
The proposed legislative compromise between Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin (WV) and Chuck Schumer (NY) would either boost the share of electric vehicles on the road or undermine such efforts completely — depending on whom you ask.
The bill, which would expand a $7,500 tax credit for U.S. consumers who purchase electric vehicles, is aimed at incentivizing U.S. companies to build out the supply chains for critical mineral components used to make the cars — a longtime goal of President Joe Biden. But many industry officials and lawmakers have expressed concern that those supply chain buildups could take years, undercutting the bill’s prospects to reduce emissions.
For EVs to qualify for the tax credit, a certain percentage of their batteries and key minerals must be sourced from the United States or a nation that is party to a U.S. free trade agreement beginning next year.
That means “[to] the extent the policy is effective, it will slant the market in the direction of American products,” George Mason economist and Bloomberg columnist Tyler Cowen wrote.
But that’s an ambitious undertaking considering that most critical resources needed in EV manufacturing — lithium, nickel, cobalt, and graphite — are mined and processed in China, Russia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Indonesia, none of which are party to U.S. free trade agreements.
In the short term, this might drive up the cost of production, cutting against the Biden administration’s climate goals and the president’s pledge to end all sales of gas-powered vehicles in the U.S. by the year 2035.
“This is the one issue that may stop this proposal from going forward,” Joseph McCabe, president and CEO of AutoForecast Solutions, said in an interview. “The current language sets aggressive time-based sourcing targets, which are considered very difficult to hit. Basically, it is designed to push out the reliance on countries like China but will most likely add significant costs and stress on the supply chain.”
“And as costs go up, they are usually passed on to the consumer,” he added. “We at AFS are expecting that the language in the bill as it currently stands will need to be adjusted in order to move forward.”
Robbie Diamond, CEO of the nonprofit group Securing America’s Future Energy, said in an interview that building out these supply chains can’t happen overnight.
“Broadly speaking,” he said, the measure “is an important step for the United States. We can’t stop one dependence on oil for transportation and go to a new dependence on batteries.”
“That said,” Diamond added, “they could make the provisions a little bit more workable.” One such change he suggested would be to broaden the definition of “free trade countries” in this instance to include military alliances. This would allow for it to be brought to NATO, he said, “and to two key non-NATO allies: Japan, Argentina, and others that have certain components of the supply chain as we continue to build it.”
(Read more at the Washington Examiner)
Many more weaknesses exist
This bill puts more IRS agents in the field than the Pentagon has employees. Despite the Democrat’s promise that they will not increase your taxes, who do you think those IRS agents will investigate (the common guy or the rich Democrat donor)?
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An op-ed by Steve Forbes says The Inflation Reduction Act would double IRS agents and audits — but the superrich aren’t the real targets
The New York Post plays host to a Steve Forbes op-ed letter that points out the vast number of IRS agents and their prey.
The Manchin-Schumer “Inflation Reduction Act,” which could clear the Senate this weekend, is supposed to raise tens of billions of dollars by adding $80 billion to the IRS budget and hiring as many as 80,000 more auditors and agents.
The plan is estimated to double the number of Americans audited each year. To quote the Church Lady from “Saturday Night Live”: “Well, isn’t that special?”
Most of the money raised from these audits won’t come from the superrich or multibillion-dollar corporations — both well-stocked with accountants and tax attorneys to fight IRS allegations.
Small-business owners and upper-middle-income workers will likely be the targets. The woman who runs an accounting firm or a restaurant won’t have the resources to fight the government in tax court.
This proposal comes just a year after the IRS’s latest scandal, with agents illegally leaking millionaires’ and billionaires’ private tax-return data to the media.
Conservatives should be especially worried. Will the Biden administration weaponize these tens of thousands of new agents against them as it’s done at the Justice Department and the FBI?
No one should forget this is precisely what happened in the Obama-era Lois Lerner affair. The agency cherry-picked for extra scrutiny the tax returns of conservative organizations and donors who happened to oppose President Barack Obama’s policies.
(Read more at the New York Post)
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Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act would allow the IRS to hire up to 87,000 new employees and raise taxes
The Daily Wire goes where no main-stream media resource has gone: reporting on the IRS agents hired under the Biden bill.
President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act would allow the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to hire up to 87,000 new employees while increasing taxes for most Americans, according to multiple reports.
The Inflation Reduction Act, negotiated by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV), would give the IRS nearly $80 billion. In previous versions of this bill, the Biden administration estimated that the new funding would allow the agency to hire up to 87,000 additional employees, according to Bloomberg Law.
Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) recently told Fox News’ Sean Hannity that the “massive influx” of agents “are not there to go after the billionaires or the giant corporations they are there to go after you. They’re going after small businesses. They are there to descend upon middle-class workers and audit the hell out of you.”
For its part, the IRS denied such a characterization and said it would target high-net-worth Americans and corporations who are “noncompliant taxpayers.”
“Large corporate and high-net-worth taxpayers often engage teams of sophisticated representatives pursuing unsettled or sometimes questionable interpretations of tax law,” Charles Rettig, the IRS commissioner, said before Congress this week, reported The New York Times. “The integrity and fairness of our tax administrative system relies upon the ability of our agency to maintain a strong, visible, robust enforcement presence directed to these and other similarly situated noncompliant taxpayers.”
(Read more at the Daily Wire)
If they have not told you about the IRS agents, what else have they not reported on?
What else has the press ignored to make Biden and his Democrats more palatable?
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Schumer-Manchin plan would increase medicine costs while killing innovation
The Washington Examiner points out how the Inflation Reduction bill will increase the costs of medicine while killing innovation.
Among the many wrongheaded features of the Manchin-Schumer tax-and-spendathon bill being pushed in Congress right now, the one on prescription drug pricing is a deadly vampire of a proposal that, for 16 years, has refused to stay deceased.
After numerous rejections of the idea by previous Congresses, this bill again revives a proposal to direct Medicare officials to “negotiate” at least some drug prices with pharmaceutical companies rather than let existing market forces set the prices. The absurd theory behind government “negotiation” is that government’s weight will wring out undue profiteering by the drug companies and thus keep prices lower for seniors while saving money for the government as well.
This theory is nonsense on so many levels that it’s hard to know where to begin in countering it.
Let’s start with facts: The Medicare Part D prescription drug program has already, ever since the program was begun in 2006, kept the cost of medicines (and of premiums for insurance coverage) significantly below projections and often kept price hikes below the inflation rate in the rest of the economy. In fact, even as prices rose astronomically throughout the rest of the economy in the last quarter of 2021, the net price of medicines actually fell 0.7% — and projections for average Part D premiums are for a 1.8% drop in 2023. In a time of systemic inflation, these price drops are almost miraculous — proof that the current system works just fine.
Moreover, the current market system encourages the rise of generic drugs, the savings from which more than offset the costs of newly developed prescription medicines that vastly improve health or save lives, making the costs quite arguably worth it.
Not only has the current system kept drug costs and pharmaceutical inflation rates well below inflation both in the overall economy and in the rest of the healthcare sector, but it also has been less expensive for taxpayers than anyone expected. In the first 10 years of the program (which is as far as projections went), the total government outlays were only 65% of what had been forecast, meaning $194 billion less taken from taxpayers.
The same misguided notions that led to the assumption that a market-led system would be more expensive than it turned out to be also guide Sen. Joe Manchin’s (D-WV) phony numbers now. The “savings” he expects from direct government price setting surely would not materialize, while he assuredly understates the costs to both government and overall drug prices by the new subsidies and restrictions his bill would provide.
Just on a financial level, then, the system both for patients and for taxpayers isn’t broke, so there’s no need to “fix” it. Alas, from two other angles, the Manchin-Schumer proposal surely would not merely fail to help an already working program but actually make things worse, perhaps disastrously so.
(Read more at the Washington Examiner)
This continues the trend started with Obamacare
However, even with the tendency of bureaucrats and lawmakers to over-regulate, I also have trust in the big pharma companies to seek ways to build their business by mandate. Therefore, look for mandated jabs (which I, for one, will refuse).
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Democrats violate rules to dare GOP to vote against insulin cap
Breitbart reports on the move by Senate Democrats to make it hard for Republicans to not vote for the Inflation Reduction bill.
Democrats have inserted a provision in the so-called “Inflation Reduction Act” that would cap the price of insulin for consumers at $35 per month, though doing so would violate the rules of the reconciliation process to pass the overall bill.
The goal is to punish Republicans for voting against the overall bill — though a separate bill on insulin prices was already making its way through the Senate.
Notably, in his first week in office, President Joe Biden canceled President Donald Trump’s executive order capping the prices for insulin and epinephrine. He then spent months attacking Congress for not lowering prescription drug prices. (Ironically, drug prices have fallen anyway, even in the midst of overall high inflation.)
The “Inflation Reduction Act” would not actually reduce inflation, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) called the bill a “fraud”; even Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) admitted inflation was not affected.
However, Democrats claim — and the CBO agrees — that the bill will reduce deficits slightly, including by raising some taxes.
CNN’s Manu Raju, quoting Sen. John Thune (R-SD), said that Republicans plan to raise a point of order to object to the insulin provision in the bill, noting that the Senate parliamentarian has already said that it violates the rules of the Senate:
(Read how this was pushed through at Breitbart)
If it takes insulin tricks and switching the ways things are done, this will come back to bite
If this bill requires the use of insulin (remembering that Biden increased the price of it upon entering the oval office) and tricks that classified this as a non-financial bill (despite raising our taxes), then Democrats will rue this day.
Biden nears Inflation Reduction Act win. What if inflation is still bad afterward?
The Washington Examiner digs into the problem of calling this an Inflation Reduction Act when the law does nothing to reduce inflation.
Regardless of the marketing, the IRA, brokered by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), may have no or minimal price repercussions, according to American Enterprise Institute senior tax policy fellow Kyle Pomerleau.
“Inflation, right now, is a big issue,” he told the Washington Examiner. “Voters are concerned about it. Passing a package that says it’s going to reduce inflation, they view that as a positive.”
“Now, policywise, I think that most of the groups that have analyzed the economics of this and find that it will have no impact on inflation are correct,” Pomerleau said. “I think at best, this is a modest impact on prices.”
For Pomerleau, Democrats’ overriding theory of the case that decreasing the federal deficit will address inflation is based on the scoring of the bill before concessions were made to Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ).
Before Schumer and Manchin struck a deal this week with Sinema, securing the 50th and final vote required to clear the legislation through the Senate using the reconciliation process and Vice President Kamala Harris, the Congressional Budget Office found the original proposal could bring down the deficit by $305 billion over the next decade, including in 2023 and 2024. But the independent federal agency also found it could have little or no counterinflationary effect during the same time period.
“I am skeptical of their theory that reducing the deficit will reduce inflation,” Pomerleau said. “But if, in fact, they are not reducing inflation much, that weakens their case.”
For Darrell West, the Brookings Institution’s governance studies vice president, the bill is designed to mitigate elevated prices related to climate and healthcare and perceived problems with longer time horizons. The current bill, which has to be approved by the Senate parliamentarian, pitches spending $64 billion on Affordable Care Act healthcare premium subsidies and $369 billion on energy and climate investments. Sinema asked Schumer and Manchin to nix their carried interest loophole provision in favor of a 1% stock buyback excise tax and $5 billion for drought resiliency.
(Read more at the Washington Examiner)
Does it seem that the mono-party has put in an advertisement for the Republican half
The only thing that will make it not seem like we are getting played by a mono-party that shifts control between its liberal and conservative wings will be this: Action on the conservative side to remedy the problems created by the Democrats.
Specifically, if the Republicans do not remove bureaucratic incumbrances to our energy industries (oil, gas, coal, and other) and remove preferences to insanity (requiring us to kowtow to transgender and other liberal agenda), then they have lost me.
Senate Democrats push through a health and climate bill after overnight “vote-a-rama”
The Epoch Times chronicles the passage of the vote-a-rama that included naps, votes, and speeches.
The Senate approved the Democrats’ sweeping health care and climate bill on Aug. 7 in a 51–50 vote, with Vice President Kamala Harris casting the tiebreaking vote.
The estimated $740 billion package next goes to the House for consideration.
“It’s been a long, tough and winding road, but at last, at last we have arrived,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said. “The Senate is making history. I am confident the Inflation Reduction Act will endure as one of the defining legislative measures of the 21st century.”
Senators engaged in a round-the-clock marathon of voting that began on Aug. 6 and stretched into the afternoon of Aug. 7. Democrats voted against some three dozen Republican amendments to the legislation.
The bill ran into trouble midday over objections to a 15 percent corporate minimum tax that was disliked by private equity firms and other industries, forcing last-minute changes.
“It will close tax loopholes and it will reduce and reduce the deficit,” Schumer said. “It will help every citizen in this country and make America a much better place.”
Americans for Tax Reform (ATR), a U.S. advocacy group, stated that the measure will increase taxes on thousands of mid-sized small businesses across the United States.
“Any business that has [private equity] in its capital structure is now considered a subsidiary of that firm and thus subject to 15 percent book tax,” John Kartch, a spokesman for ATR, wrote on Twitter.
“As written, the provision now appears restructured to define any company with private equity in its capital structure to be considered a subsidiary of that private equity firm for purposes of the tax,” the group said in a statement. “This means that these companies would now be swept up in the new 15 percent tax on book income. This provision would greatly expand the reach of the book minimum tax to apply to small and midsize companies that require capital investment to grow their business.”
Concerns over objections to the corporate minimum tax on private equity firms and other industries threatened to slow the progress.
Republicans said the measure would undermine an economy that policymakers are struggling to keep from plummeting into recession. They said the bill’s business taxes would hurt job creation and force prices skyward, making it harder for people to cope with the nation’s worst inflation since the 1980s.
“Democrats have already robbed American families once through inflation, and now their solution is to rob American families a second time,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said on the floor.
Spending and tax increases in the legislation would eliminate jobs while having an insignificant impact on inflation and climate change, the Kentucky Republican said.
(Read more at The Epoch Times)
Someone wake up Orwell to tell him he has been resurrected
Someone nudge George Orwell. The Affordable Care Act made my insurance much more expensive. The COVID-19 vaccine was not a vaccine. The Disinformation Governance Board has gone into overdrive despite the Biden regime’s announcement of dissolving that board. Biden would have us believe that men are not necessarily men nor are women necessarily women. And now the Inflation Reduction Act will likely increase inflation.
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The latest version of Senate Democrats’ bill raises taxes on small businesses
Breitbart reports on how Democrats have decided to take another stab at the heart of America.
The latest iteration of the Senate Democrats’ reconciliation bill, known as the “Inflation Reduction Act,” would raise taxes on thousands of small and mid-sized businesses across the country, according to Americans for Tax Reform (ATR).
Senate Democrats changed the language of their new minimum corporate book tax, which would now hit small and midsized businesses well below the $1 billion profit threshold the tax intended to hit.
The new tax would impose a 15 percent minimum tax on the book income of “applicable corporations.” However, the latest change to the book tax would impact any business with private equity in its capital structure.
As John Kartch, vice president of ATR’s communications, said, “Any business that has [private equity] in its capital structure is now considered a subsidiary of that firm and thus subject to 15% book tax.”
As ATR explained:
As written, the provision now appears restructured to define any company with private equity in its capital structure to be considered a subsidiary of that private equity firm for purposes of the tax. This means that these companies would now be swept up in the new 15 percent tax on book income.
This provision would greatly expand the reach of the book minimum tax to apply to small and midsize companies that require capital investment to grow their business.
More than 18,000 businesses held by investment funds and partnerships that employ close to 11.7 million people would be targeted by the new tax increase, according to ATR’s Kartch.
(Read more at Breitbart)
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U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland admitted in a hastily called press conference on Thursday afternoon that he had personally signed off on the search warrant issued against former President Trump, authorizing the unprecedented FBI raid.
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