Price tag for Biden signature climate law balloons to multiple of initial estimates

[Geee]

Washington Examiner

The federal government may end up spending $800 billion more than originally projected to subsidize green energy technologies under the Inflation Reduction Act, fueling a campaign from Republicans and a threat from the legislation's own chief architect to roll its programs back.

Democrats passed the energy and healthcare spending law last August without any Republican support in what became the defining achievement of President Joe Biden's first two years in office. The law expanded existing tax credits for electric vehicles and renewable energy while creating new tax incentives designed to expand manufacturing of those technologies in the United States to serve both the administration's climate change and industrial agendas.

 

The original estimate tied to the legislation projected its energy and climate change-related programs to cost $369 billion over 10 years.

More recent projections estimate that the IRS will shell out more and, by some measures, three times more.

[Geee]

Liberal policies are making the American dream unaffordable

See if you can figure out what these three news stories have in common.

First, high-profile political efforts to defund and demoralize entire police forces are giving rise to an unlikely anarcho-capitalist trend. Police are retiring or leaving the profession in droves, and their former departments are failing to recruit new officers in many major cities, thanks mostly to the profound antipathy shown toward the police by elected officials. Meanwhile, wealthy people are increasingly hiring their own pricey private security to protect themselves, their possessions, and their businesses. As a result, private security officers now outnumber police by more than 50%.

Second, new cars have become unaffordable for ordinary people , with the national average sales price hitting $48,000. Part of the problem has been a recent chip shortage that made cheaper vehicles less profitable to produce. But even as that problem recedes, high prices are sticking thanks to government policies. This includes federal Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards, a Cash for Clunkers program that destroyed 677,000 perfectly good cars, many of which would otherwise still be around today driving down new car prices, and government regulations that require unnecessary and expensive features, such as video displays and backup cameras.

The result? Cars have become supercomputers on wheels, and the cost to own a new one has risen from less than 30% of the real median household income in 1995 to 59% in 2023. Just wait until everyone is forced, as California aspires to do, to purchase even more expensive electric vehicles.