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There has some talk among the legacy media about how recent legislative victories (the semiconductor giveaway and the pending reconciliation) might give President Biden and congressional Democrats new momentum and help them hold onto their majority, at least in the Senate.
Unfortunately, voters don’t care about legislative victories. Nor should they. Legislative victories are only important to voters if they lead to improvements in their lives; if they make the economy better or the nation or their neighborhood safer.
So far, the “victories” to date have consisted of taking money from taxpayers (either current or future) and spending it on a bunch of things that matter to folks in Washington. The most recent example is, of course, the newly revived reconciliation legislation.
That legislation, misnamed the Inflation Reduction Act, is going to be much like the semiconductor legislation or the infrastructure legislation before that or the American Rescue Plan before that — an outsized and pointless giveaway to special interests that would do nothing to improve the lot of Americans or, in the worst case, actively damage Americans.
The current legislation would, according to the Tax Foundation, increase taxes on those in every income quintile and, consequently, reduce economic growth.
It also would increase federal spending by more than $400 billion over 10 years, which is, of course, the entire purpose of the exercise.
Here’s what it would not do: reduce inflation.
Our friends at the University of Pennsylvania have done some analysis that indicates that the legislation would have no measurable effect on inflation.
