Stupid Is As Stupid Does

As the inflation rate teases double digits, and the Fed lobs three-quarter-point Hail Marys to try and contain it, its architects prove they are as stubborn as they are stupid. The Democrats just announced a breakthrough with their in-house 'obstructor,' Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, on a tax-and-spend package aimed at energy and health care. The package, at about a third of a trillion dollars, is a far cry from either the $4T Biden pipe dream or the $2.2T "Build Back Better" boondoggle, but it's still a truckton of money. It includes big chunks of green energy subsidy and a whole lotta bucks to prop up ObamaCare, and it slaps a minimum 15% tax on billion dollar corporations.

In classic Washingtonian newspeak, it’s called the “Inflation Reduction Act.”

With the economy in what all but Biden's blind partisans call a recession and inflation sucking living standards out of American's [redacted]s, it seems a twisted time to do more of what created the problem in the first place, but here it is nonetheless.

Justin Amash @justinamash

Politicians will not only find a way to make inflation worse, but they’ll also call it the Inflation Reduction Act and insist that you thank them for it.

This feels like the Dems' last gasp attempt at posting a "win" (for whom, we might ask) ahead of the mid-terms and locking in some of their agenda ahead of the near-certain gridlock of the next couple years. I won't pick at the bill yet, because such things are bound to change substantially as they go through the process. While there are reportedly some positives therein, we all know what it's about.

It's being touted as a huge win for the environment, no matter that China and India are building lots and lots of new coal plants - and not just in China and India. America's green measures are nothing more than very expensive spitting in the wind.

A serious effort by America to mitigate carbon emissions would comprise two efforts: develop modular nuclear power plants that could be sold and deployed around the world, and drill like crazy for natural gas so that it can be exported around the planet. Natural gas not only produces virtually no particulate emissions (whereas coal particulates kill tens of thousands a year), it yields 4x the energy per unit carbon emitted that coal does. Simply converting from coal to gas would reduce carbon emissions by leaps and bounds. All this could be done with regulatory changes, not hundreds of billions in government spending.

China's laughing at us, as is Russia. The West has been engaged in energy-economic suicide for years, and it's playing right into their hands.

Beyond the folly of domestic green energy pursuits, there's the matter of printing the money to pay for all this. While they claim that all this is "paid for" by the new taxes, it's a very rare day that predicted tax revenues from rate increases materialize as advertised. Of course, higher taxes dampen economies, and dampened economies tend to see inflation decrease, but that once-unimaginable phenomenon known as stagflation emerged in the late 1970s, and we may be at the front end of another bout of it.

The solution is as obvious as the source. The government dumped too much money into the economy, and thus created inflation. So, to reverse it, the government should stop its spending and "stimulating."

But, NOooOOoo, they won't do that, because that's their only reason for living. Buying votes and ramming undesired agendas down our throats is the new American way, after all.

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