Congressional approval ratings have been swirling down the toilet for years now. The belief that our lawmakers are buffoons is one of the only unifying issues in a deeply divided country. The “doing a good job” number has been hovering around 20% for the last couple of years, which means that neither side of the aisle has much good to say.
A huge contributing factor to the unpopularity is our legislators’ penchant for passing zillion-paged omnibus bills that they haven’t read. Making things worse, the bills are given names that are both misleading and insulting.
The infamous “Inflation Reduction Act” is a prime example of this. It had precious little to do with reducing inflation. It was so named because inflation was what was worrying every American and dragging Joe Biden’s approval ratings almost as low as those of Congress. The Dems figured that they could at least dupe the people who were dumb enough to vote for Biden, so “Inflation Reduction Act” it was.
The bill was really a green boondoggle to get cash flowing to the climate grifters who had been put in a timeout during the Trump years. Presumably, it was the American climate grifters who were supposed to make out on the deal. No doubt some have. Still, it’s not working out exactly as planned.
The Inflation Reduction Act has spurred nearly $110 billion in U.S. clean-energy projects since it passed almost a year ago, a Wall Street Journal analysis shows. Companies based overseas, largely from South Korea, Japan and China, are involved in projects accounting for more than 60% of that spending. Fifteen of the 20 largest such investments, nearly all in battery factories, involve foreign businesses, the Journal’s analysis shows.
These overseas manufacturers will be able to claim billions of dollars in tax credits, making them among the biggest winners from the climate law. The credits are often tied to production volume, rewarding the largest investors.Japan’s Panasonic, one of the few companies to publicly estimate the impact of the law, could earn more than $2 billion in tax credits a year based on the capacity of battery plants it is operating or building in Nevada and Kansas. The company, which supplies batteries to electric-vehicle maker Tesla, is considering a third factory in the U.S. that would lift that total.
Just super.
Nothing says, “We care about the US economy,” like enabling Panasonic to rake in all the cash. At a time when it needs as much of its money as possible to stay at home, the United States is now funding corporate welfare states abroad.
The real problem, as the WSJ article explains, is the fact that domestic supply chains for solar panels and batteries are practically nonexistent and “are still years away because foreign companies dominate nearly every step in the process, from raw materials to sophisticated parts.”
This is a familiar refrain with US government lust to mandate green technology and keep the payola levels high. Green Dems are forever promising things that are either nigh on impossible, or aren’t doable without American taxpayers hemorrhaging cash all about the globe. There’s no problem with the latter if you’re one of those 21st century globalist freaks.
Many of us, however, feel that the one world Kumbaya inevitably leads to associating with some unsavory actors:
But some investments from Chinese companies have fueled a backlash as tensions between the two countries escalate.
At least 10 of the projects representing nearly $8 billion in investments included in the Journal’s analysis involve companies either based in China or with substantial ties to China through their core operations or large investors.
China’s genius in the last several decades was to coax American corporations into doing business there. Now it’s our biggest enemy, and one of our biggest business partners.
Awkward.
If the United States is to have much of a future, it needs to be extricating itself from business relations with the ChiComs, not using taxpayer money to get into more of them.
“Here’s some bonus money for you guys while you’re working on your plans to go to war with us. Anything we can do to help, just let us know.”
In a perfect world, we would elect people to Congress who would immediately reject the very idea of an omnibus boondoggle bill. That’s how a representative republic should work. Unfortunately, modern American elected officials too often forget who their real bosses are.
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