Judge Glock writes for City Journal about one of the worst relics of the Biden administration.
On signing the Inflation Reduction Act on August 16, 2022, President Joe Biden called it “one of the most significant laws in our history.” With the new law, Biden said, “the American people won and the special interests lost.” He repeated the line.
The largest portion of the bill supposedly passed for the benefit of ordinary Americans went to tax credits for favored green corporations, amounting to more than half of the IRA’s nearly $400 billion in estimated environmental spending. The act also authorized hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidized financing for green corporations and environmentalist groups. Populist rhetoric aside, Biden was funneling unprecedented sums of money to a limited number of well-connected firms and “special interests.”
The government’s cost estimates for the act proved almost comically understated. Meantime, much of the new revenue that the law was supposed to generate never materialized. Many of the bill’s projects remain stuck in bureaucratic limbo.
Presented as a plan to reform the economy, tame inflation, and reduce the deficit, the Inflation Reduction Act will be remembered as ineffective in all but increasing both inflation and the deficit. From its name to its premise to its contents, the IRA was a patchwork of often contradictory ideas, hastily bundled together in one of the most brazen acts of political logrolling in recent memory. Biden’s presidency may be over, but Americans will be paying for this law—and its false promises—for years to come. …
… Congress soon realized that Biden’s mandates and regulations were making the bill far more expensive than expected. Less than a year after the IRA passed, new congressional estimates for the ten-year cost of the corporate electricity and energy tax credits had risen by 40 percent. Predicted costs for the tax credits for carbon-capture and clean-fuel technology had doubled. And the bill for the advanced manufacturing tax credits, as Carr had predicted, would “well exceed” initial projections: the expected costs were four times the original estimate.
