Kamala Harris is keeping quiet about climate change because the so-called Inflation Reduction Act's climate provisions are going to screw America good and hard for decades, to the tune of $3 trillion

 The climate policies she would offer promise huge costs for negligible benefits. It’d be one thing to ask for sacrifices that could save the planet. But even at a whopping official price tag of $369 billion over 10 years, the Inflation Reduction Act’s climate measures as written were likely to lower the projected global temperature in 2100 by less than 0.03 degree Fahrenheit. In reality, the IRA has turned out to be an even rawer deal. The cost has rapidly ballooned to somewhere north of $3 trillion over 30 to 40 years, even as emission cuts have been slower and smaller than predicted. No wonder Ms. Harris isn’t trumpeting it.

-- Bjorn Lomborg, here 

 

Kamala Harris was the tie-breaking vote in the US Senate twice to advance the bill into law.

 

 

When you have to write articles like this with eight weeks to go lol

 How Kamala Harris Can Prove She’s Not a Flip-flopping Phony

Ed Kilgore, New York Magazine

Kamala Harris’s effort to depict herself as a candidate of safe but forward-looking change (as opposed to the decidedly unsafe and reactionary change represented by Donald Trump) has unsurprisingly spurred a host of GOP attacks on a cherry-picked assortment of unpopular or at least questionable-sounding policy positions from her past, ranging from support for a single-payer health-care system and sympathy for undocumented immigrants to opposition to fracking and to aggressive policing tactics.

 

Is Chris Cillizza, formerly of CNN, WaPo, Meet the Depressed, and PMSNBC cherry-picking?

 

I mean, most of these lists are incomplete because Harris' has left a LONG trail demonstrating her extreme leftism in speeches, interviews, tweets, policy statements from 2019, et cetera, and it's a daunting task to list them all. Any list of them will show an editor's bias about what's important in the editor's opinion.

But the idea from James Carville endorsed by Kilgore that Harris can just say she learned in the White House that spending $800 billion over ten years in the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act to reverse climate change was good enough when in 2019 she said it would take $1 trillion PER YEAR for ten years is just laughable.

 

LAUGHABLE.

That's hardly going to fly with the climate change left, let alone anyone else.

 

Ed Kilgore's just pretending that isn't the case. He's an enabler of Harris' silence in the face of the flip-flops.

 

 

 

 

Joe Biden says Inflation Reduction Act was really a Climate Change Act, says it was misnamed

 

Democrats profiting off the little guy: Corporate profits at 12% under Bidenflation have been much better than under Trump at 4%

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The dirty little secret about corporate profits: they've been much better after 13 quarters of Biden than they were after 16 quarters of Trump, averaging 4.14% yoy under Trump and 12.13% under Biden.

 

This is a great little arrangement between Democrats and big business. Democrat-aligned business makes off with your cash while politicians pretend to do something about it in exchange for campaign contributions, with the important benefit that inflation inflates away the cost of their spendthrift deficit spending.

The so-called Inflation Reduction Act, which did no such thing and Democrats said would cost nothing, is estimated to cost the taxpayers nearly $800 billion by 2031 according to the liberal Brookings Institution.

This is your fascist America.

 

Shielding price increases by blaming them on inflation has been the modus operandi of the period. Price gouging is real, but gimmicks which address only symptoms won't solve the problem, which is caused by increasing the money supply and deliberately increasing other costs as a matter of policy, like energy and regulation, which businesses also can plausibly blame.

 

But Harris knows the demagogic value of running against price gouging.

 

Price controls poll particularly well. You can fool most of the people most of the time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pure fascism: Utility sector is profiteering off the federally subsidized green energy push

 Utility stocks are on fire — here are Wall Street analysts' top picks :

The S&P 500 Utilities ETF (XLU) is up more than 12% year to date in a reversal from last year when investors soured on the sector due to expensive projects and high interest rates. ...

Constellation Energy (CEG) is the largest owner of nuclear plants in the US. The Baltimore-based company has been a beneficiary of the government's push to transition to green energies and growing power demand from data centers. Constellation shares are up more than 85% year to date as the company forecasts base earnings to grow by at least 10% annually through the decade. ... The analyst highlights that Constellation produces power at roughly $25 per megawatt hour, while the government's Inflation Reduction Act allows for a selling price floor of $45 per megawatt hour, providing a minimum of $20 margin per megawatt hour. ... Constellation has been operating as a standalone energy provider since 2022 after a spin-off from utility giant Exelon (EXC). The company has been buying back shares and recently upped its dividend ahead of its earnings due on Thursday. ...

NextEra Energy (NEE): The $147-billion-market-cap company is one of the largest electric power generators in the country. While NextEra owns a regulated utility in Florida, investors are more interested in its non-regulated part of the business, NextEra Energy Resources, which involves developing renewable energy in the US. ... "The re-domestication of industry in the US supported by public policy will drive the need for more electricity," CEO John Ketchum told analysts in April. The stock is up about 20% year to date. ...

Among the regulated utilities, Southern Company (SO) is one of the best performers inside the Utility sector year to date, with shares up more than 10%.

It's great to be a Democrat.

Insurance companies got rich because of Obamacare rules, now electric utilities are poised to get rich because of Biden climate rules

 Utilities are shutting down "dirty" capacity without adequately replacing it. The law of supply and demand means only one thing: higher prices. OK, two: blackouts.

Meanwhile, tax credits under Biden's phony Inflation Reduction Act are masking the true costs of renewables.

From a Wall Street Journal op-ed "The Coming Electricity Crisis: Artificial-intelligence data centers and climate rules are pushing the power grid to what could become a breaking point" here :

Obama Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz last week predicted that utilities will ultimately have to rely more on gas, coal and nuclear plants to support surging demand. “We’re not going to build 100 gigawatts of new renewables in a few years,” he said. No kidding.

The problem is that utilities are rapidly retiring fossil-fuel and nuclear plants. “We are subtracting dispatchable [fossil fuel] resources at a pace that’s not sustainable, and we can’t build dispatchable resources to replace the dispatchable resources we’re shutting down,” Federal Energy Regulatory Commissioner Mark Christie warned this month.

About 20 gigawatts of fossil-fuel power are scheduled to retire over the next two years—enough to power 15 million homes—including a large natural-gas plant in Massachusetts that serves as a crucial source of electricity in cold snaps. PJM’s external market monitor last week warned that up to 30% of the region’s installed capacity is at risk of retiring by 2030.

Some plants are nearing the end of their useful life-spans, but an onslaught of costly regulation is the bigger cause. A soon-to-be-finalized Environmental Protection Agency rule would require natural-gas plants to install expensive and unproven carbon capture technology.

The PJM report cites “the role of states and the federal government in subsidizing resources and in environmental regulation.” It added: “The simple fact is that the sources of new capacity that could fully replace the retiring capacity have not been clearly identified.”

Meantime, the Inflation Reduction Act’s huge renewable subsidies make it harder for fossil-fuel and nuclear plants to compete in wholesale power markets. The cost of producing power from solar and wind is roughly the same as from natural gas. But IRA tax credits can offset up to 50% of the cost of renewable operators. 

Baseload plants can’t turn a profit operating only when needed to back up renewables, so they are closing. This was the main culprit for Texas’s week-long power outage in February 2021 and the eastern U.S.’s rolling blackouts during Christmas 2022.

Thanks to Biden's so-called Inflation Reduction Act, the Japs are buying U.S. Steel for $14.9 billion

 U.S. Steel also supplies to the renewable energy industry and stands to benefit from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which provides tax credits and other incentives for such projects, something that attracted suitors.

More.

 

There is nothing America will not sell out, as long as the price is right.

 

As usual the media and the Democrats, but I repeat myself, are portraying the House Republican bill which lifts the debt ceiling by $1.5 trillion as a bill with "big spending cuts"

This is how NPR, who else?, frames the issue from the beginning:

The House of Representatives has narrowly approved a Republican bill to raise the debt limit. However, it ties the ability to raise that debt ceiling to big spending cuts. And this House bill rolls back several of President Biden's key policies.

The House Republican bill, now languishing in the Senate, rolls back spending levels to pre-COVID levels. That's not a spending cut. That's saying, as Biden himself says, the emergency is over.

If the emergency is over, the emergency spending should end, too.

Outlays in fiscal 2020 and 2021 ballooned because of the new pandemic spending. Deficits for just those two years soared to almost $6 trillion. Republicans seek to roll that spending back. Democrats want that spending to form the new baseline. If Democrats succeed, Katy bar the door. The national debt will absolutely explode.

NPR knows this. It just chooses to hide the facts about it all, how the pandemic spending created these massive deficits, and how that spending which flooded the economy with money contributed to the new inflation:

So it raises the debt limit by $1.5 trillion or through March of 2024, whichever comes first. It also sets spending levels for federal programs to those that were in place two years ago. It limits the growth of spending going forward to 1% annually. But as you said, it also targets a list of the president's policies. It repeals the president's student loan forgiveness program, which is tied up in the courts. It claws back unspent COVID relief money and rolls back key energy provisions that were in the Inflation Reduction Act. It also puts in place new work requirements for adults without children who receive federal assistance like food stamps or Medicaid.

Once again, it was the idiot liberal Republican George H. W. Bush who advanced the anti-capitalist Democrat global warming agenda

 . . . the Inflation Reduction Act was signed by President Biden earlier this summer. It had been thirty years and sixty-five days since President George H.W. Bush signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Rio de Janeiro.

Here.

George also spawned the redundant hate crime legislation, huge increases to LEGAL immigration, wheel-chair access at every intersection's crosswalk among other expensive accommodations for the ambulatory handicapped, who in 2016 are fewer than 7% of the population, an unchastened Saddam Hussein, and READ MY LIPS . . . NEW TAXES.

Oh yeah. He also literally spawned the guy who didn't keep America safe on 911 and gave us the expensive nation-building wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the insidious Patriot Act, but don't get me started.

Everything BUSH has been terrible for America, which is saying a lot when everything Democrat always is anyway.  

Phony Democrat SALT Caucus is out there today boasting it is going to vote for the Manchin bill anyway, which doesn't undo the Trump tax increases on the wealthy they promised to get rid of

State, local relief not in cards for residents of high-tax states as House assesses Inflation Reduction Act :

  a group of House Democrats say they will still vote for the party’s spending package without SALT reform . . . members of the SALT Caucus ... have vowed to oppose a bill without SALT relief

 

From their website:

SUOZZI,  GOTTHEIMER, YOUNG,  GARBARINO  ANNOUNCE  NEW  BIPARTISAN  SALT  CAUCUS  TO  FIGHT  FOR  TAX  RELIEF  FOR  MIDDLE  CLASS  FAMILIES

April 15, 2021  

Press Release 

32 Democrats and Republicans join

Today, April 15, 2021, Tom Suozzi (NY-3), U.S. Representatives Josh Gottheimer (NJ-5),  Young Kim (CA-39), and Andrew Garbarino (NY-2) announced the formation of the new bipartisan SALT Caucus to advocate for new tax relief from Congress. 

  

“Our effort to restore the SALT deduction is gaining momentum. Together, Democrats and Republicans alike, we will advocate for the restoration of the SALT deduction and highlight the middle class families who have been unfairly hurt by the cap,” said Rep. Tom Suozzi, SALT Caucus Co-Chair. “The cap on the SALT deduction has been a body blow to New York and middle-class families throughout the country. At the end of the day, we must fix this injustice.”

 

“We’re formally launching a new bipartisan group — the SALT Caucus — because, for all our Members, and for the tens of thousands of middle class families we represent, it is high time that Congress reinstates the State and Local Tax deduction, so we can get more dollars back in to the pockets of so many struggling families — especially as we recover from this pandemic,” said Rep. Josh Gottheimer, SALT Caucus Co-Chair. “This bipartisan group we’re founding today, with members from coast to coast and across the political spectrum, are all banding together to reinstate the State and Local Tax deduction, to find a way to get this done in Congress, and to actually get tax relief for the hard working middle class families we represent.”

 

“Hardworking Californians in the 39th District and across my home state have been burdened enough by high state and local taxes. It is estimated that in the 2022 tax year, California’s 39th District will pay on average more than $640 million due to the SALT cap,” said Rep. Young Kim, SALT Caucus Co-Chair. “I am proud to fight for lower taxes for my constituents as Co-Chair of the SALT Caucus and am looking forward to working together to ensure California workers and families can keep more of their hard-earned money.” 

 

“The SALT cap penalizes working class Long Islanders. From firefighters to police officers, to teachers, to nurses, and small business owners, I hear from people every day about what a crushing blow the SALT cap has delivered them. I’m proud to be a Co-Chair of the bipartisan SALT Caucus to fully restore the deduction once and for all,” said Rep. Andrew Garbarino, SALT Caucus Co-Chair.

 

“A critical component of our overall economic recovery must be the repeal of the state and local tax deduction cap that was imposed by the 2017 tax law,” said Rep. Mikie Sherrill, SALT Caucus Vice Chair. “There is a misconception that the SALT deduction doesn’t help middle class families. But in high cost of living areas like my district, SALT does in fact make a critical difference in helping make ends meet for our middle class residents like teachers and law enforcement officers, who depend on this deduction to afford the high cost of living in our area. To be clear, the 2017 tax bill specifically targeted states and communities like mine that have prioritized key investments in our public schools, living wages for workers, environmental protections, the list goes on. I’m proud to be launching this bipartisan caucus to ensure we deliver a win on this issue for families in New Jersey and across the country.”

 

“The cap on the state and local tax deduction hurts middle class California families,” said Rep. Katie Porter, SALT Caucus Vice Chair. “During the coronavirus pandemic, our state and local governments have led public health efforts on testing and vaccines—a potent reminder of the important work they do. Restoring the state and local tax deduction, which has been in our tax code since its inception, gives taxpayers and communities the ability to invest in their priorities and levels the playing field across states for federal taxation.”

 

“Counties are on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic, supporting nearly 1,000 hospitals, more than 1,900 public health authorities and other services essential to residents’ safety and well-being. The human and financial impacts of addressing this health and economic emergency are staggering,” said National Association of Counties Executive Director Matthew Chase. “We applaud the formation of this bipartisan caucus committed to repealing the state and local tax deduction cap, which would reinstate our local control of our tax systems and strengthen the ability of our counties and local communities to deliver essential public services, such as emergency response, public health and infrastructure.”

 

The SALT Caucus leadership consists of: 

 

Co-Chair Tom Suozzi (NY-3)

Co-Chair Josh Gottheimer (NJ-5)

Co-Chair Andrew Garbarino (NY-2)

Co-Chair Young Kim (CA-39)

Bill Pascrell, Jr. (NJ-9), SALT Caucus Vice Chair  

Katie Porter (CA-45), SALT Caucus Vice Chair

Mikie Sherrill (NJ-11), SALT Caucus Vice Chair

Jamie Raskin (MD-08), SALT Caucus Vice Chair

Chris Smith (NJ-04), SALT Caucus Vice Chair

Lauren Underwood (IL-14), SALT Caucus Vice Chair

 

The other founding members of the SALT Caucus include: Reps. Danny Davis, Nicole Malliotakis, Julia Brownley, Judy Chu, Lee Zeldin, Michelle Steel, Mike Levin, Jimmy Panetta, Jimmy Gomez, Brian Higgins, Jerry Nadler, Tom Malinowski, Jeff Van Drew, Alan Lowenthal, Anna Eshoo, Andy Kim, Ted Lieu, Brad Schneider, John Larson, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Mike Garcia, and Gregory Meeks.

 

LOL, watch for dozens of phony House Democrats who ran on repeal of Trump's 2017 SALT caps vote once again come Friday for a bill (Joe Manchin's) which doesn't remove them and adds more taxes on most Americans

Trump raising taxes on rich coastal elites and Democrats never doing anything about it after running on a promise to do so will never not be funny.

 House Dems Drop SALT Pledges To Back Manchin Bill

Democrats and Republicans have forcefully disputed whether the Inflation Reduction Act would raise taxes on middle-class households making less than $400,000, which would violate a core Biden pledge. The non-partisan Joint Committee on Taxation, found that the measure would raise $16.7 billion on taxpayers making less than $200,000 in 2023.

Josh Gottheimer NJ-5

Mikie Sherrill NJ-11

Tom Suozzi NY-3

Katie Porter CA-45

Mike Levin CA

Tom Malinowski NJ-7

Josh Harder CA-10

Julia Brownley CA-26