Sean Casten holds up to $500,000 in company that is expected to benefit from Democrats’ so-called Inflation Reduction Act

Illinois Democrat Sean Casten is very happy with his party’s “historic” green energy spending. His latest financial disclosure may show why: The congressman holds up to $500,000 in a green energy company that will likely benefit from the spending.

Casten has spent much of the last week touting Democrats’ so-called Inflation Reduction Act, which is not expected to have “any measurable impact on inflation” but does funnel nearly $400 billion toward green energy initiatives. Casten in a statement last week called that spending “a historic win for American families and for the future of our planet.” It could also be a historic win for Casten’s investment portfolio.

That’s because Casten, according to a financial disclosure he filed last week, holds between $250,000 and $500,000 in Greenleaf Power, a Sacramento-based green energy company that sells “carbon-neutral electricity” to utility companies. The Casten-backed green energy bill contains specific provisions that are likely to benefit Greenleaf. The legislation, for example, allocates roughly $30 billion toward “grant and loan programs for states and electric utilities” that obtain “clean electricity” like that offered by Greenleaf. The bill also provides generous tax credits to property owners who install equipment to harness alternative energy sources such as biomass, in which Greenleaf specializes.

Still, none of Casten’s many statements touting the Inflation Reduction Act’s green energy spending disclose the Democrat’s six-figure stake in Greenleaf, which brought Casten up to $50,000 in “partnership income” in 2021 alone. Casten’s decision to fixate on Democrats’ work to “fight climate change,” meanwhile, may prove to be shortsighted as the congressman faces a competitive reelection campaign against Republican Keith Pekau. Only 35 percent of U.S. adults are “extremely or very concerned” about the effects of climate change, down from 44 percent just three years ago, according to an Associated Press poll.

Power the Future founder and executive director Daniel Turner called it a “shame that the American people are going to be on the hook” for “provisions that enrich this member of Congress.” He also argued that the “green energy” Greenleaf produces from biomass is not truly “green”—the company generates electricity by burning wood, a far cry from the wind and solar energy Casten has touted in the past.

“It just shows you the political motives behind this piece of legislation,” Turner told the Washington Free Beacon. “The fact that we consider biomass clean is really laughable, because biomass is really just burning trees. So why are we proud of that?”

Casten did not return a request for comment. The Democrat’s latest financial disclosure provides some clarity on his Greenleaf holding, as the congressman’s prior disclosure listed Greenleaf but claimed the asset had no value. Casten filed that 2020 disclosure as he urged Congress to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on “tax credits for clean energy.” In one case, Casten went as far as to attack fellow congressional Democrat Joe Manchin after the West Virginia senator expressed opposition toward the spending.

“We’re trying to drive a car into the future,” Casten said during an September 2021 MSNBC interview. “With all due respect to Mr. Manchin, until we’re lining up to take off the emergency brake this car ain’t driving very fast. It’s certainly not driving as fast as it needs to, and that’s the pressure we as Democrats have to keep focused on.” Casten’s past clean energy spending advocacy also excluded any mention of his Greenleaf investment.

Beyond the American public’s waning concern about climate change, it’s unclear if the Inflation Reduction Act, which Joe Biden signed into law on Tuesday, will have a sizable impact on climate change. A climate scientist who led an independent analysis of the package told the Associated Press the legislation will reduce global warming “not a lot.”

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

Data suggests ‘economic weakness will intensify and spread more broadly’

America’s recessionary drumbeat just got louder as a key economic gauge from the Conference Board dropped for the fifth month in a row, weighed down by a slowing job market, weak manufacturing new orders, and deep consumer pessimism.

The Leading Economic Index (LEI) for the United States, which is a forward-looking gauge designed to predict business cycle shifts including recessions, fell by 0.4 percent in July, following a 0.7 percent drop in June, the Conference Board said on Aug. 18.

“The U.S. LEI declined for the fifth consecutive month in July, suggesting recession risks are rising in the near term,” Ataman Ozyildirim, senior director for economics at the Conference Board, said in a statement.

While the U.S. economy met the common rule-of-thumb definition for a recession when gross domestic product (GDP) printed negative for two quarters in a row earlier this year, recessions are formally called by a panel of economists at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). They use a broader definition than the two-quarter rule, relying on a wide range of indicators, including the labor market, which has remained on a relatively solid footing.

The Biden administration has seized on the NBER’s criteria for declaring a downturn, insisting that the economy isn’t in a recession, with White House officials often citing labor market strength—though there are signs that it’s cooling.

Even though unemployment is at 3.5 percent and the latest non-farm payrolls report showed U.S. employers adding a forecast-beating 528,000 in July, a growing number of U.S. corporations have announced hiring freezes or layoffs, while the number of Americans filing for unemployment insurance has been slowly trending up.

Mild or Severe Recession?

The slowing labor market was one of the factors singled out by Ozyildirim in his comments on the LEI’s fifth consecutive monthly slump.

“Consumer pessimism and equity market volatility as well as slowing labor markets, housing construction, and manufacturing new orders suggest that economic weakness will intensify and spread more broadly throughout the US economy,” he said, adding that the Conference Board projects that the U.S. economy won’t grow in the third quarter and “could tip into a short but mild recession by the end of the year or early 2023.”

While the view that America’s recession will be short and mild has its advocates, economist Nouriel Roubini, who got the nickname “Dr. Doom” after correctly predicting the 2007–08 financial crisis, calls that view “delusional.”

Roubini said in a recent interview on Bloomberg TV that he believes persistently high inflation will force the Fed to keep monetary settings tight, which will tip the U.S. economy into a “severe recession and a severe debt and financial crisis” that will be long-lasting.

Similarly, former President Donald Trump recently warned that, unless the country changes course in key areas—including energy policy—he believes something worse than a recession is on the horizon.

“Not recession. Recession’s a nice word. We’re going to have a much bigger problem than recession,” Trump said at a rally in Arizona at the end of July. “We’ll have a depression.”

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

The media has been hiding economic reports over the last few weeks. As we get closer to the midterms, they will be doing what they can to protect Democrats.

But Americans continue to suffer from inflation, high gas prices, and other stains on their wallets. And now, another sign has come out that the recession is already on us.

From Washington Examiner:

Housing starts measure the annualized change in the number of new residential buildings that began construction. Last month, they declined by a hefty 9.6% to a 1.45 million annualized rate after posting slight gains in June, according to a Tuesday report from the Commerce Department.

If the rising price of ground beef or unleaded regular didn’t tip you off that the economy isn’t great, this will.

The number of housing starts in July fell a steep 9.6%. This number measures how many new residential buildings begin construction.

Even a slight drop suggests a weakening economy. The housing market is always the first industry to suffer in a recession (or a depression).

When things are bad, people cut back on spending. The bigger expenses, like houses and cars, are cut first.

Then everything else quickly follows. These cutbacks force companies to make cuts themselves. In some cases, they lay off as many workers as possible.

So, this number is much more important than you might realize. New housing products dropped last month.

That’s consistent with other numbers that have come out recently. Inflation is hitting construction, as everything is costing more.

The housing bubble from 2020 long burst. Americans don’t want to risk moving or buying a new home, because it’s just too expensive.

The rest will come shortly, whether Biden believes it or not.

UPDATE: And just in, now housing sales just smashed through the floor. From CNBC:

Sales of previously owned homes fell nearly 6% in July compared with June, according to a monthly report from the National Association of Realtors.

Sales dropped about 20% from the same month a year ago.

“In terms of economic impact we are surely in a housing recession because builders are not building,” said Lawrence Yun, chief economist for the Realtors.

The fallout from Biden’s leadership just keeps piling up, folks.

SOURCE: The Patriot Journal

In a master-level stroke of inversion, former President Donald Trump has found a new use for his ability to all but ensure the success of Republican candidates.

On Wednesday via Truth Social, Trump unleashed his “endorsements” against three Democrats: Daniel Goldman, a former federal prosecutor who is campaigning for New York’s 10th Congressional District, Carolyn Maloney of New York and Rep. Jerrold Nadler. Both Maloney and Nadler are competing for a redrawn 12th Congressional District.

Based upon context, these “endorsements” from Trump can be considered to be either darkly disingenuous or delivered sarcastically with a proverbial wink to his supporters. Judge for yourself.

On Truth Social, Trump wrote first about Goldman, “Lawyer Dan Goldman is running for Congress, NY-10, and it is my great honor to Strongly Endorse him. I do this not because of the fact that he headed up the Impeachment Committee and lost, but because he was honorable, fair, and highly intelligent. While it was my honor to beat him, and beat him badly, Dan Goldman has a wonderful future ahead….”

“….He will be very compassionate and compromising to those within the Republican Party, and will do everything possible to make sure they have a fair chance at winning against the Radical Left Democrats, who he knows are destroying our Country. I would like to thank Dan for fighting so hard for America, and for working so tirelessly to stop “Trump.” He was not easy to beat, but winning against him made me realize just how very talented I am!” he continued.

Trump suggested that Goldman will be a moderate “very compassionate and compromising to those within the Republican Party” a damning descriptor in the uber-radicalized far-left of the 2022 Democrat party.

Minutes later, a similar “endorsement” for Maloney, with some kind words for her opponent Nadler appeared on Trump’s account.

“A vote for Carolyn Maloney in NY-12 is a vote for the future! She is a kind and wonderful person, who has always said terrific things about me, and will support me no matter what I do, just as I supported her very early on. She begged for a check with no quid pro quo, and I gave it to her. In fact, I gave her many….”

According to the Federal Elections Commission, Trump did in fact donate to Maloney’s campaign in 1993, 1994, 1998, 2006 and again in 2009 for a total of $4,000.

He continued and even took aim at Jerry Nadler. “….On the other hand, Jerry Nadler is likewise a hard driving man of the people, whose energy and attention to detail is unlike anyone else in Congress. He is high energy, sharp, quick-witted, and bright. You can’t go wrong with either, but Carolyn Maloney is the better man. She will lead our Country into a very GREEN and prosperous future. Carolyn has my Complete and Total Endorsement, she will never let our Conservative Movement down!”

The highlight of the snarky message is definitely the combined swipe at both Maloney and Nadler, “You can’t go wrong with either, but Carolyn Maloney is the better man.”

Naturally, Goldman and Maloney both vehemently rejected the “endorsement” from the 45th President. Goldman’s campaign attempted to turn the joke around on Trump in a statement reported by The Blaze.

Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee say they have received information from the non-partisan scorekeeper at the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) challenging the Biden administration’s narrative that Americans making less than $400,000 a year won’t see higher IRS audit rates.

The remarks came in an Aug. 12 statement that was published as the Democrat-controlled House passed the Inflation Reduction Act, which includes nearly $46 billion in additional funding for IRS enforcement of the $80 billion or so total funding boost to the tax agency.

Committee Republicans said that the CBO statement they were provided with confirms that, under the new legislation, lower and middle-income Americans will be squeezed harder by the tax man to the tune of at least $20 billion.

‘Supercharged IRS’ Coming For Middle-Income Americans

This figure was arrived at by calculating how much less tax revenue would flow into government coffers if legislators had accepted amendment 5404 (pdf) proposed by Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) that explicitly called for none of the funds appropriated under the Inflation Reduction Act to be used to audit taxpayers making less than $400,000 a year.

“The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) confirms that had this amendment passed and lower- and middle-income taxpayers been protected, revenue in Democrats’ bill would have been reduced by at least $20 billion,” Committee Republicans said.

This confirms that “at least $20 billion of the $124 billion in new revenue expected by a supercharged IRS will be coming from higher audits on low- and middle-income Americans” and that this would be “in addition to existing audits on these income levels.”

The Epoch Times has reached out to the CBO with a request for confirmation of the scorekeeper’s assessment and comment, with no response received by publication.

‘Absolutely Not’ Increasing Audit Scrutiny?

Republicans said the CBO statement proves that members of the Biden administration are misleading the public by claiming that lower and middle-income Americans won’t face additional tax audits.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has insisted Republican claims that tax auditors will target lower and middle-income Americans at higher rates are false and politically motivated.

“I direct that any additional resources—including any new personnel or auditors that are hired—shall not be used to increase the share of small business or households below the $400,000 threshold that are audited relative to historical levels,” Yellen said in an Aug. 10 letter to IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig.

“This means that, contrary to the misinformation from opponents of this legislation, small business or households earning $400,000 per year or less will not see an increase in the chances that they are audited,” she added.

The IRS chief, too, has insisted that the tax agency would “absolutely not” be increasing audit scrutiny on small businesses or middle-income Americans relative to “recent years,” according to a letter to members of the Senate on Aug. 4 (pdf).

More Audits ‘Almost Certain’

A previous CBO analysis indicated that, under basically the same funding plan as is featured in the Inflation Reduction Act, audit rates would be restored to levels around 10 years ago and that audit rates would rise “for all taxpayers,” though ones with higher incomes would face the biggest increase.

IRS audit rates have fallen sharply over the past decade, with the Government Accountability Office (GAO) saying in a report that rates in 2019 were about one third of those in 2010 for all income groups, dropping from 0.9 percent down to 0.25 percent.

A CBO estimate (pdf) shows that that the additional $80 billion in funding will bring in around $204 billion in new revenues, including from enforcement.

Despite Yellen’s and Rettig’s insistence that audit rates wouldn’t jump for those making under $400,000, Rachel Greszler, senior research fellow at the Grover M. Hermann Center, wrote in an op-ed for the Heritage Foundation that this is likely not the case.

“Despite the Biden administration’s claims, it’s almost certain that households making less than $400,000 a year would face increased audits under Democrats’ bill,” Greszler wrote.

“And despite estimates from official congressional scorekeepers that the Schumer-Manchin-Biden tax increase indeed would raise taxes on those Americans, the administration has doubled down on the claim,” she added.

Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Texas) said on the House floor that the way Democrats can manage to raise $200 billion in new tax revenues is “with thousands of new agents targeting what I would call Walmart shoppers.”

“They’re real hard working American families. They are my constituents, they are my neighbors in my district. They’re living paycheck to paycheck, struggling with inflation and high gas prices,” Brady said.

“They will be hit with over 700,000 new audits thanks to a skyrocketing surge in IRS agents,” he added.

“Higher taxes, harassing IRS audits on our Walmart shoppers, no relief from inflation—all as America battles a recession,” Brady said.

The Inflation Reduction Act passed in a strictly party-line vote on Aug. 12, with the bill next heading to Joe Biden’s desk for final approval.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

More than a third of Americans have drawn on their savings accounts to handle rising prices, taking out hundreds of dollars on average, according to a recent survey by New York Life Insurance Company.

Since January, 36 percent of Americans have drawn an average of $617 from their savings to pay their bills, the company found. Nearly 90 percent of those surveyed expressed anxiety that a recession is approaching, and roughly a third reported being “uncertain” or “anxious” about their personal finances. Respondents cited monthly bills, health care costs, grocery prices, and gas prices as their areas of greatest financial concern.

Voters overwhelmingly blame Joe Biden for the state of the economy. Sixty-four percent of Americans, including 53 percent of Democrats, believe the president’s policy decisions are to blame for soaring costs. While White House officials boasted this week about slowing inflation, prices are still up 8.5 percent from last year, with that number even higher in several key swing states.

Americans are not replenishing their savings accounts as they drain them. The personal savings rate, or the proportion of income people don’t spend or lose to taxes, more than halved between July 2021 and June 2022, falling from 10.5 percent to 5.1 percent. 

To make up for tightening purse strings, Americans are increasingly turning to debt. Americans’ collective credit card debt jumped to $890 billion last quarter, marking the largest yearly increase in two decades. The number of credit cards also hit an all-time high in the second quarter, with more than 500 million in circulation. 

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

WARNING: Disturbing content. Viewer discretion is advised.

The Oxford English dictionary defines meme as “a humorous image, video, piece of text, etc., that is copied (often with slight variations) and spread rapidly by internet users.” Depending on how rotten your brain is from prolonged exposure to social media, you may or may not be aware that we are in the midst of a “meme war” that will ultimately determine the fate of American democracy.

One of the most significant new developments in this raging conflict is the emergence of the “Dark Brandon” meme, which portrays Joe Biden as a laser-eyed Machiavellian overlord skilled in the art of four-dimensional political chess. It also seeks to expropriate the “Brandon” moniker from Biden’s critics, who embraced the phrase “Let’s Go, Brandon!” in 2021 after a filthy NASCAR journalist falsely claimed that fans at Talladega were chanting in support of winning driver Brandon Brown. (Fact Check: They were chanting, “F— Joe Biden!”)

In any event, the Washington Free Beacon has exclusively obtained a number of avant-garde “Dark Brandon” memes created with the help of cutting edge artificial intelligence technology. Bear in mind: The mainstream media does not want you, the American people, to see these humorous images. Enjoy!

Source: The Washington Free Beacon

Banks, federal agencies, and ESG investors handicap the expansion of America’s energy supply

The oil and gas industry is looking to the future with caution, and plans for expanding production of fossil fuels appear to be limited. 

At the Enercom Energy Investment conference in Denver this week, the oft-repeated mantra among CEOs was that they will use the bulk of their profits to pay down debt and return money to investors through stock buybacks and dividend payments, with significantly less emphasis on major new capital investments. In addition, executives highlighted their commitment to environmental, social, and governance (ESG) principles for producing cleaner energy and addressing social justice issues. 

As Democrats in Congress prepare to allocate $369 billion via the Inflation Reduction Act to subsidize electric cars and wind and solar energy, America’s oil and gas producers face an uphill battle. A shrinking supply of capital, a hostile regulatory environment, and shortages of materials and labor are creating significant hurdles against new drilling. 

“I don’t want subsidies for our industry; we don’t need subsidies in our industry,” Chris Wright, CEO of Liberty Energy, told The Epoch Times. “We just don’t want barriers standing in the way of us providing the energy that people in the world want and need.”

Wall Street Steps Back from Fossil Fuel Financing

Among those barriers are banks and investors cutting back financing for new fossil fuel projects, due to both economic and political factors. In line with the ESG movement, 114 banks, collectively representing 38 percent of global banking assets, signed the Commitment Statement of the UN Net-Zero Banking Alliance, in which they pledged to “transition” their lending portfolios to reduce greenhouse-gas (GNG) emissions and reach net-zero GNG emissions by 2050 or sooner. American banks that signed this pledge include JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citibank, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley.

Another global money club, Climate Action 100+, is “an investor-led initiative to ensure the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitters take necessary action on climate change.” It has 700 investment companies as members, representing $68 trillion in assets, and includes asset managers such as BlackRock, State Street, Fidelity, Invesco, Fisher, and PIMCO; insurers such as Aegon, Allianz, and AXA; state pension funds like CalPERS, CalSTRS, New York State Common Retirement Fund, New York City Pension Funds, and Maryland State Retirement and Pension System; and university endowment funds from Harvard, MIT, and University of Rochester, among others.

In response, West Virginia and Texas recently barred banks that discriminate against fossil fuel companies from getting municipal banking contracts in their respective states. On July 28, for example, West Virginia State Treasurer Riley Moore announced that JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo would be placed on a Restricted Financial Institution List because they “are engaged in boycotts of fossil fuel companies, according to new state law, and are no longer eligible to enter into state banking contracts.”

“Each financial institution placed on the Restricted Financial Institution List today has published written environmental or social policies categorically limiting commercial relations with energy companies engaged in certain coal mining, extraction or utilization activities, rather than considering the financial or risk profile for each company,” Moore said in an official statement. “While the ‘Environmental, Social and Governance’ or ‘ESG’ movement might be politically popular in California or New York, financial institutions need to understand their practices are hurting people across West Virginia.”

Last week, 19 state attorneys general sent letters to BlackRock CEO Larry Fink declaring that his efforts to impose the ESG agenda on companies whose shares it owns run counter to its fiduciary obligations to pensioners, intentionally harm America’s energy companies, and, to the extent that financial companies collude in this effort, raise anti-trust concerns. BlackRock is the world’s largest asset manager, with approximately $10 trillion in assets under management. 

In a letter to Fink, Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich wrote, “BlackRock appears to use the hard-earned money of our states’ citizens to circumvent the best possible return on investment, as well as their vote. BlackRock’s past public commitments indicate that it has used citizens’ assets to pressure companies to comply with international agreements such as the Paris Agreement that force the phase-out of fossil fuels, increase energy prices, drive inflation, and weaken the national security of the United States.”

Global ESG Clubs Leave Oil and Gas Industry ‘Starved for Capital’

Oil and gas executives say the push to divest from fossil fuels by global organizations like Climate Action 100+, the UN Net-Zero Banking Alliance, and the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero is having its intended effect.  

“Our industry is being starved for capital,” Anthony Gallegos, CEO of Independence Contract Drilling, told The Epoch Times, noting that banks are increasingly unwilling to provide revolving lines of credit or asset-based lending facilities [ABLFs] to the oil and gas industry. “There’s probably a third as many banks today that are willing to provide revolvers and ABLFs to [oil and gas] service companies compared to what there would have been six years ago,” he said. “There are investors, there are endowments, there are limited partnerships, some of which have historically invested in energy, that today have a mandate that they cannot make investments in fossil fuel industries.”

“The concern that the State of West Virginia, the State of Texas, and other states have had about financial institutions trying to dissuade investment I think is very real,” Wright said. “What that impacts most is the smaller or rising players that count on bank debt financing and reserve-based lending [RBL]. There is massively less RBL capital today than a few years ago; there’s a number of big European banks that were players in this space that have pulled out; there are American banks that want to show a decline in the percent of their portfolio that’s in oil and gas; there is less private equity capital because university endowments and CalPERS, CalSTRS, and other state pension funds, are divesting from oil and gas.”

Curtailing credit to smaller, private oil and gas companies is particularly harmful, Wright said, because they are currently the most active in developing new production. By contrast to the larger, public oil and gas companies, which are cautiously investing in new growth, “The private companies are investing relatively aggressively. Sixty percent of the drilling and fracking activity right now in the United States is private oil and gas companies,” Wright said. 

In response to state actions, several U.S. banks recently denied they are doing anything to reduce financing for fossil fuels. Goldman Sachs stated in a July letter to West Virginia’s treasurer that it provided more than $118 billion in financing to fossil fuel companies. JPMorgan wrote that it had more than $42 billion in credit exposure to oil and gas companies. 

In an apparent reversal of BlackRock’s position in 2020 that “we will be increasingly disposed to vote against management and board directors when companies are not making sufficient progress on sustainability-related disclosures and the business practices and plans underlying them,” BlackRock announced in May that it will likely support fewer climate-related corporate votes in 2022 than it did in 2021.

Investors Are Risk-Averse After Oil Price Volatility, Bankruptcies

In addition to the ESG movement, the oil and gas industry is also emerging from a period of over-investment in new fracking projects a decade ago, which together with increased output in the Middle East caused oil and gas prices to fall sharply in 2016 and then collapse in 2020 during pandemic lockdowns, forcing many oil and gas companies into bankruptcy. This has caused many investors to take a more cautious approach, particularly now that the economy is slowing and oil and gas prices have fallen from their peaks in the spring. 

“I don’t think you’re ever going to see capital flow into this industry the way it did in 2012 through 2014,” Gallegos said. “Investors have made it clear: ‘We’re not here to fund your growth just for growth’s sake; if we’re going to give you money, you’re going to have to demonstrate a pathway toward generating returns where we’re seeing something back as investors.’”

Accordingly, CEOs are now more focused on returning cash to their equity and debt investors. 

Fitch Ratings Director Neil Stirrat said that oil and gas companies were “exercising capital discipline” and using profits to repay debt and repurchase equity, with only a “marginal” increase in capital expenditures. This increase, about 15 percent on average across the industry, was approximately equal to the increase in companies’ costs due to inflation. 

Fitch noted that industry credit ratings were generally going in a positive direction, as oil and gas companies reduced leverage, extended loan maturities, and improved their financial health. Whereas in 2020, Fitch downgraded the debt of 20 oil and gas companies, while upgrading four; in 2021, 13 companies were upgraded and only two downgraded. Year to date in 2022, Fitch upgraded the debt ratings of 10 oil and gas companies, with no downgrades. The average debt ratio for North American oil and gas companies, calculated as debt to earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA), came down from 4-to-1 in 2016 to 1-to-1 today.

A Hostile Regulatory Environment for Fossil Fuels

In addition to less generous investors, America’s fossil fuel companies faced a hostile regulatory environment. A June 28 report from the Heritage Foundation, for example, noted a rush by oil and gas companies in the final months of 2020 to secure drilling permits before the Biden administration took control. 

“To date, Biden is the only president in modern history not to have held a single oil and gas lease sale on federal lands despite clear direction from Congress to do so quarterly,” the report stated. “While the Department of Interior is being forced by court order to hold a lease sale this quarter, it increased fees by 50 percent and decreased the amount of available acreage for drilling by 80 percent—even as it cut fees and red tape for renewable ‘green’ energy production.”

In addition, Biden has not completed any offshore lease sales. By contrast, the Trump administration sold eight offshore leases, and the Obama administration sold 29. However, in 2021, the Biden administration issued more permits to drill on federal lands than the Trump administration did in its first year in office, though issuance of drilling permits has declined sharply in 2022.

Biden has also used other agencies, including the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), to discourage investment in new oil and gas projects. The SEC issued a mandate in March that all listed companies must produce audited reports detailing their fossil fuel emissions, as well as those of suppliers and customers, together with their plans to reduce them. The SEC claimed that it was compelled to issue this mandate because “investors representing literally tens of trillions of dollars support climate-related disclosures.”

Government Spends Hundreds of Billions to Support Wind and Solar

Besides government policies and global money-club boycotts, the hundreds of billions in subsidies for renewable energy further undermine oil, gas, and coal companies’ ability to compete. This includes the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the invocation by Biden of the Defense Production Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act, currently being debated in the House of Representatives after being passed by the Senate.

In return for voting for green subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W. Va.) reportedly negotiated a “side deal” that Congress would later approve a lessening of the regulatory burden for fossil fuels, including more congressional action to attempt to force the Biden administration to sell more oil and gas leases and issue new drilling permits. However, many doubt that Manchin will ever receive his part of the bargain, given that Democrats were virtually unanimous in rejecting a GOP-backed bill to streamline permit approvals last week.  

The version of the Inflation Reduction Act that Manchin approved even granted the EPA the right to regulate carbon emissions. This was a critical issue because the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in West Virginia v. EPA stated that the EPA’s decree that electric utilities must transition to renewable energy and away from coal and other fossil fuels was not legal because Congress never gave the EPA the authority to regulate carbon emissions. The Inflation Reduction Act would have given the EPA this authority, invalidating the Supreme Court’s decision, which had ruled in favor of Manchin’s home state. 

Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W. Va.) offered an amendment, which all Democrats, including Manchin, voted against, to remove from the bill the provision that granted sweeping new powers to the EPA. When that effort failed, Capito then challenged the provision’s compliance with budget reconciliation rules, which allow the Senate to bypass the filibuster. The Senate parliamentarian agreed with Capito, and the language granting the EPA new authority was removed from the bill. 

“You could make the argument, and I’m sure Manchin would make it, that we’re getting some of those barriers out of the way for hydrocarbon development, and that would on the margin be positive,” Wright said. “But I balance that with the certainty that we’re going to spend $300 billion subsidizing unreliable, more expensive, grid-destabilizing energy, and if you subsidize it heavily enough, you’re going to get it no matter how destructive it is to our grid. No matter how negative it is, the subsidies are big enough that it is in the economic interests of those parties to build it, and we’re going to pay the price.”

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

Chris Deluzio didn’t pay his property taxes. He backs a proposal that would increase IRS scrutiny on Americans.

Pennsylvania Democrat Chris Deluzio, who is running in a competitive House race, was hit with penalties for delinquent property taxes last year, according to real estate records reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.

Deluzio, a voting rights attorney, neglected to pay $2,976 in property taxes in 2021, for the historic Georgian colonial in Pittsburgh that he purchased two years ago. He was fined a little over $100 in penalties and interest, which he paid in March 2022, according to county records.

News of Deluzio’s late tax could become a campaign issue, and comes as he and Democratic Party leaders are advocating for the Inflation Reduction Act, which would steer billions of dollars into increased tax enforcement by the Internal Revenue Service. It also comes as other Democrats, including Rep. Matthew Cartwright and Wisconsin Senate candidate Mandela Barnes, have faced scrutiny for their history of late property tax payments. Cartwright also endorsed the Inflation Reduction Act.

Deluzio, who is worth between $1.9 million and $5.5 million, according to his financial disclosure report, endorsed the Biden administration-backed Inflation Reduction Act earlier this month. The bill, which raises corporate taxes, would allocate $80 billion to the IRS, including $46.6 billion for tax enforcement and audit activities.

“There are a lot great policies for #PA17 in The Inflation Reduction Act. It’s a bill that would ramp up clean energy and lower the cost of medicine, save people $ and help tackle inflation – all paid for by the ultra-rich and corporations,” said Deluzio in an Aug. 3 post on Twitter.

Deluzio’s campaign responded to a request for comment after publication. His spokesman, Matt Koos, said the late payment was a banking error.

“Chris’s bank made a mistake and did not pay the reassessed property taxes on time from escrow,” said Koos. “When Chris realized this, he made the payment.”

Republicans and some independent economic analysts say the bill will end up raising taxes for low-income and middle-class earners. According to an analysis by the Joint Committee on Taxation, a nonpartisan congressional committee, the proposal would function as a tax increase for Americans across all income brackets over the next decade.

The Senate passed the bill on a party-line vote last week, with Vice President Kamala Harris casting the tie-breaking vote for Democrats. The House will vote on the package on Friday.

Deluzio is facing off against Republican and Pennsylvania businessman Jeremy Shaffer in the race, which is considered a tossup, according to the Cook Political Report. The candidates are vying to replace Democratic Rep. Conor Lamb, who ran for U.S. Senate instead of seeking reelection and lost in the primary.

Update 11:27 a.m.: This piece has been updated to include comment from the Deluzio campaign.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

A coalition of 19 Republican attorneys general says BlackRock CEO Larry Fink prioritizes left-wing political initiatives over shareholder returns and is jeopardizing the retirement of middle class workers with pensions.

Fink’s embrace of environmental, social, and governance investment policies, known as ESG, potentially runs afoul of several laws, the AGs charge in a letter sent to Fink. Instead of managing state pension funds and finding the best returns on investment, the AGs write, BlackRock uses “citizens’ assets to pressure companies to comply with international agreements” such as various climate initiatives.

Republicans are increasingly targeting asset managers such as BlackRock over their pro-ESG policies. They allege that these asset managers are transforming into backdoor channels for liberals to implement policies outside of the legislative process and leaving aside their principle, legal duty: maximizing returns for shareholders.

Critics of ESG say the policies are often arbitrary and can hurt a company’s bottom line. Moreover, ESG metrics can be gamed. Many companies, such as Tesla, receive a high ESG score under one metric while they rank poorly on another.

“Rather than being a spectator betting on the game, BlackRock appears to have put on a quarterback jersey and actively taken the field,” the AGs write. “As a firm, Blackrock has committed to implementing an ESG engagement and voting strategy across all assets under management.”

BlackRock manages an estimated $10 trillion in assets, a number larger than many first-world economies. Billions of those dollars come from U.S. pension funds. That extraordinary amount of money also gives billionaire Fink, a large donor to Democratic Party candidates and causes, tremendous influence over companies BlackRock invests in. Should Blackrock pull investments from a company over its climate or racial policies, two categories often included in ESG metrics, the company’s stock price would plummet.

The AGs assert that when BlackRock engages with companies over climate practices, it violates the states’ law about maximizing financial returns. For example, if BlackRock representatives pressure a company CEO to adopt a more expensive way to source energy in order to meet climate goals, that company may post lower profits. That drop in profits may translate to a lower stock price and harm pension funds invested in that company.

BlackRock has emerged as an explicit leader in the push “to retire fossil fuels,” the AGs allege. Part of that may be purely ideological or because of a desire to “attract investment from European or left-wing pension funds,” the AGs add. Regardless of motivation, BlackRock is obligated per law to only seek the best financial return on their investments.

Pressure from asset managers such as BlackRock appears effective. Sixty percent of respondents to a Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas survey last year said “investor pressure” was the number one reason that oil companies such as Exxon are not expanding operations.

The Biden administration recently picked BlackRock Investment Institute chairman Thomas Donilon to co-chair the Foreign Affairs Policy Board. During his time at the BlackRock Investment Institute, Donilon called on Americans to triple their investments in China, the world’s largest polluter.

West Virginia announced last month that it would no longer do business with Wall Street firms that boycott the fossil fuel industry. One of those firms included BlackRock. The ban will cost the firms $18 billion a year, according to the state’s treasury office.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

Matt Cartwright, who has a history of tax delinquency, endorses bill that more than doubles agency’s size

Congressman Matt Cartwright has a history of tax delinquency. That isn’t stopping the Pennsylvania Democrat from backing a plan that would sic an army of nearly 90,000 new IRS agents on the American people.

Cartwright last year owed $436.63 in penalties and interest that stemmed from late property tax payments on his Washington, D.C., condo, the Washington Free Beacon reported last week. The incident was not his first tax-related mishap—from 2013 to 2018, the Democrat racked up thousands of dollars in penalties and interest related to his tax delinquencies. Still, Cartwright on Monday announced his support for the Inflation Reduction Act, Democrats’ $430 billion spending bill that does little to fight inflation and gives the IRS $80 billion to hire up to 87,000 additional employees.

Cartwright’s history of tax delinquency and subsequent support for the bill could haunt the congressman as he faces a difficult reelection bid against GOP challenger Jim Bognet. Cartwright trails the Republican by 1 point with 9 percent of voters undecided, internal polling obtained by the Free Beacon shows. 

Cartwright will also have to overcome Joe Biden’s historic unpopularity, which has even extended to the president’s hometown of Scranton. In Cartwright’s eighth district, which includes Scranton, just 38 percent of voters approve of Biden, compared with 60 percent who disapprove, the Free Beacon revealed Wednesday. Despite Biden’s hometown woes, Cartwright is standing by the president—unlike some of his House Democratic colleagues, the congressman has publicly backed Biden to run for reelection in 2024. Cartwright was also a staunch Biden supporter during the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, having said in 2019 that he was “honored” to endorse his “friend, northeastern PA hometown boy, Joe Biden for president.”

Cartwright did not return a request for comment. His Monday statement voicing support for Democrats’ latest spending bill did not include a comment on its IRS-related provisions. Should that bill pass the House, the IRS will receive $80 billion to hire as many as 87,000 additional employees. The hiring spree would more than double the size of the agency’s workforce, making the IRS larger than the Pentagon, State Department, FBI, and Border Patrol combined, the Free Beacon reported. Bognet has railed against the proposal, arguing that the Inflation Reduction Act should instead be called the “Audit America Act.”

“With that many new IRS agents, every small business can expect to be audited,” Bognet said Monday. “We must stop this spending spree, and we must stop this auditing spree.”

Beyond the Cartwright-backed bill’s proposed IRS expansion, even liberal economists don’t believe the $430 billion Inflation Reduction Act will reduce inflation. Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi, whom Biden himself routinely cites, said in a new report that the legislation will cause no change in inflation until the third quarter of 2023, when Americans can expect to enjoy a .01 percent decrease.

Cartwright is nevertheless touting the bill as a win for Democrats. In his Monday statement, he called the bill “landmark legislation” that “the American people have been waiting for.”

Cartwright’s race against Bognet is not his first. The Democrat narrowly defeated Bognet by roughly 3 points in 2020, a result that marked the tightest reelection bid of his career. Bognet has thus far raised $1.2 million to Cartwright’s $3.5 million.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

China and Russia are the clear winners of the the carbon-reducing provisions in the Democrats’ latest spending bill that aim to cut fossil fuel emissions by 40 percent by 2030, according to former President Donald Trump’s erstwhile economic adviser.

Stephen Moore, a Trump-era adviser and senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation, told NTD in a recent interview that the climate-related provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act—now en route to final House approval—would hamstring American energy production and benefit adversaries.

“The two big winners from this bill clearly are Russia and China,” Moore said, adding that he thinks the bill is not just bad for the U.S. economy but it’s “really bad for national security to give up our energy dominance.”

Moore pointed out that China—which is responsible for around five times more carbon emissions than the United States—is now building dozens of massive coal plants and “obviously, they don’t care about climate change.”

As a major exporter of fossil fuels, Russia also stands to gain from efforts to accelerate curbs on U.S. carbon emissions as that would keep crude prices elevated and bolster Russia’s revenue stream, Moore said.

The economist argued that the Biden administration has “basically declared a war on our fossil fuels,” while pointing to Germany’s “experiment” of going all-in on clean energy a decade or so ago that he said “basically led to a complete economic collapse.”

“Let’s not follow in their footsteps,” he said.

Markets or Government Subsidies?

The Inflation Reduction Act includes $369 billion in climate and energy provisions, with measures like tax credits for buying electric vehicles, making homes more energy efficient, and installing residential solar panels and battery systems.

The measure also reinstates the superfund tax on crude and imported oil, which could lead to higher energy bills for households, and it includes a fee of up to $1,500 per ton for methane emissions.

Overall, the bill is set to more than triple power production from wind, solar, and energy storage capacity installations, according to an analysis from the American Clean Power Association (ACP).

“More simply, it means that roughly 40 percent of the country’s electricity will come from wind, solar, and energy storage by 2030,” ACP said in the analysis, which projects that the Inflation Reduction Act will, overall, deliver an estimated 525 to 550 gigawatts of new non-fossil fuel power by the end of the decade, up from the current 211 gigawatts.

The bill is also expected to generate over $900 billion in economic activity via the construction of clean energy projects between now and 2030, according to the association.

Moore said that he doesn’t object to renewable sources of energy but argued that market forces rather than government subsidies should be their key driver.

“We didn’t have the government subsidize Henry Ford when he invented cars,” Moore said. “We didn’t have the the federal government subsidize Standard Oil when it started making … gas plentiful and cheap for everyone. So why do we need to have the government throw hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars in this industry?”

Moore also argued that, contrary to what its name implies, the bill won’t reduce inflation.

Inflation Reduction?

The Inflation Reduction Act “will increase inflation,” Moore said, adding that, “the reason we have 9 percent inflation today is because of the massive Biden spending spree.”

“There’s two things you don’t want to do when you have massive inflation. You don’t want to spend more government money. And when you’re in a recession, you don’t want to raise taxes. This bill makes both those mistakes,” he said.

Some disagree with Moore about the bill’s impact on inflation.

Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers said in an Aug. 9 interview in The Harvard Gazette that “the tendency of this bill will be to reduce inflation because over time it reduces demand by bringing down budget deficits.”

Summers also argued that it would bolster the supply of key commodities in the energy sector, helping push down prices.

Other backers of the bill, like Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), say the government subsidies for clean energy will have a knock-on effect and boost private investment in the sector and so accelerate cutting carbon emissions.

“This is going to be more massive than people realize,” Khanna told Politico in a recent interview.

“If the government invests $300 billion in solar, wind, batteries, and heat pumps, that has the potential to unlock trillions of dollars in private sector investment in climate,” he added.

Moore argued that the bill is less about the environment and more about money.

“This is a massive, now trillion-dollar, industry. This is about money, folks, this doesn’t have anything to do about cleaning up the environment or keeping our environment safe,” he said.

“This is massive numbers of huge companies and huge investors. They’re going to get very, very rich off of these hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars of subsidies,” Moore added.

The American Petroleum Institute (API), a fossil fuels industry group, identified six problematic provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act that it argued would undermine the industry’s ability to promote energy security for American consumers.

Besides the superfund tax and methane emission fees, the API also noted additional costs imposed on energy companies with the bill’s minimum book tax provisions and increased rental fees on onshore leases.

The group also panned the bill’s omitting of comprehensive permitting reform, which API believes is key for bolstering domestic energy production, lowering costs for consumers, and helping the country meet its emission objectives.

“Glaringly absent in the bill is permitting reform, which is required for America’s infrastructure needs and to bolster critical oil, natural gas, and renewable supplies to meet our current and future energy demand,” said Mike Sommers, API president and CEO, in a statement.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

Mandela Barnes’s record to be tested as Republicans home in on anti-police rhetoric, personal issues

Mandela Barnes, a far-left Wisconsin Senate candidate bankrolled by anti-police groups, easily clinched the state’s Democratic nomination on Tuesday, after a friendly primary that effectively ended two weeks ago when his main competitor dropped out and endorsed him.

But the smooth sailing is about to end as he enters the general election against incumbent Republican senator Ron Johnson, and the Republican Party homes in on Barnes’s history as a progressive firebrand.

During the primary, Barnes’s opponents avoided attacks on his political record, including his criticism of law enforcement, far-left economic policies, and personal issues such as his tax delinquency. He also attempted to distance himself from some of the more radical policies on the left, telling the Washington Free Beacon that he doesn’t support the “defund the police” movement—even as he raked in his largest donations from Lead the Way 2022, the Working Families Party, and other anti-law-enforcement organizations.

But Johnson will almost certainly highlight Barnes’s controversial policy positions during the general election, according to Republican strategists.

“There weren’t many elbows thrown in that primary,” said Mark Graul, a Wisconsin Republican strategist. “[These issues are] going to come out over the next few months.”

Keith Gilkes, a Wisconsin Republican political consultant, predicted that Barnes will have a “very difficult time appealing statewide coming from that Democratic progressive liberal viewpoint with the voters around the state of Wisconsin outside of Dane and Milwaukee county,” the bluest areas in the state.

Barnes, who was born in Milwaukee in 1986, worked as a community organizer for Milwaukee Inner-City Congregations Allied for Hope before entering politics in 2012. He spearheaded a campaign that railed against “mass incarceration” in Wisconsin, and sought to reduce the state’s prison population by half through early release and treatment programs.

Later that year, Barnes was elected to the state assembly in a deep-blue district in Milwaukee, after ousting Democratic incumbent Jason Fields in the primary. Barnes, with backing from the state teachers’ union, argued that Fields was too conservative and campaigned against the incumbent’s support for school vouchers.

As a state legislator, Barnes backed criminal justice reform policies and sponsored a 2016 bill to abolish cash bail in the state, a position his campaign says he still supports. The bill would require Wisconsin judges to “release a defendant before trial” rather than setting monetary bail, unless the court found clear evidence that the individual would “cause serious bodily harm to a member of the community.” Prosecutors would also be prohibited from using “the nature, number, and gravity” of the charges to argue against release.

Bail reform has been a contentious issue in Wisconsin, where six people were killed and dozens injured last year at a Christmas parade in Waukesha by a repeat felon who had been released on low bail shortly before the attack.

Barnes has also taken far-left stances on economic and environmental issues. As lieutenant governor, he led a commission on climate change that proposed divesting state pension funds from fossil fuels, instituting a carbon tax, and requiring schools to teach a racially focused climate justice curriculum.

“He’s much further left than most Wisconsinites are … and I think people are going to learn that over the course of the next three months,” said Graul.

Barnes’s personal record could also be an obstacle. He has been delinquent on property taxes, and blew up at a reporter who asked about the late payments in 2019, claiming that the “check is in the mail.” He was barred from registering his car due to outstanding parking tickets in 2018, and relied on state police to chauffeur him around.

He also misrepresented his college background, claiming he received a journalism degree from Alabama A&M University in 2008. After journalists questioned this claim in 2019, he admitted that he did not graduate due to “a small technical thing” involving his failure to turn in completed coursework.

Republicans are likely to highlight Barnes’s history of controversial statements as well. He once described the U.S. founding as “awful,” citing the legacy of slavery, and was photographed holding a t-shirt reading “Abolish ICE”—a reference to the radical movement to defund Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Barnes’s viability as a general election candidate is also largely untested. His only competitive race has been a 2016 Democratic primary bid for state senate against incumbent Democrat Lena Taylor. Barnes ran to Taylor’s left, and she ended up winning the race in a blowout.

Barnes’s election as lieutenant governor was on a joint ticket with Democratic governor Tony Evers, where statewide general election voters generally pay less attention to the running mate, according to political operatives. Evers beat incumbent Republican Scott Walker in the race by one point.

“The bottom line is [Barnes has] never stood for statewide general election,” said Gilkes. “He ran in a Democratic statewide primary [for lieutenant governor in 2018], but ultimately he was under Tony Evers, which is what everybody was voting for.”

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

Cryin’ Brian Schatz

A Democratic senator was overcome with emotion on Sunday as the Senate prepared to pass legislation that would dramatically expand the IRS and permanently solve so-called climate change, the Washington Post reports:

Even before the vote was final, Democratic lawmakers on the chamber floor rejoiced and cheered, shaking hands and hugging, as their Republican counterparts cast their votes and headed for the exits for a month-long summer break. Manchin made a beeline for Schumer’s desk, as the two men leaned their heads together and clasped their hands. Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), a proponent of climate change provisions, broke into tears.

Schatz praised the passage of what some are calling the “IRS Expansion” bill as a “historic victory for the United States and the planet.” The legislation, which is expected to pass the House later this week, solves climate change by giving Americans earning $300,000 a year tax credits to buy an $80,000 electric SUV for just $72,500. It also allocates $10 million to combat “racial equity issues” within the Department of Agriculture.

Cryin’ Brian is best known for supporting colonialism and exploiting indigenous land; he claims to “represent” Hawaii despite being a white man born in Michigan to a Canadian doctor.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

‘I don’t want to answer that question because we have not—that’s not—yeah, I don’t want to answer that question,’ Rep. Cori Bush (D.) told reporters

Joe Biden, whose average approval rating sits at just 39.6 percent, insists Democratic voters want him to seek reelection in 2024. Several members of Biden’s own party, however, are refusing to back the 79-year-old president.

“I don’t want to answer that question because we have not—that’s not—yeah, I don’t want to answer that question,” Rep. Cori Bush (D., Mo.) told reporters last month when asked whether she would back Biden in the next presidential election.

Source: The Washington Free Beacon

In June, Toyota warned buyers of its bZ4X electric SUV not to drive their vehicles for fear the wheels could fall off. Toyota said at the time the cause was a mystery, but it would look into the glitch.

Toyota has not yet found a solution to the problem and is offering to buy back the SUV from its owners, according to CNN.

“We know that our customers have many choices when it comes to purchasing a vehicle. We appreciate their loyalty and are supporting them through this recall,” Toyota said in a statement, according to The Verge. “However, if a customer does not want to proceed with the provided options, we will offer to repurchase their bZ4X.”

Plan B for owners who want to keep a vehicle they may never be able to drive is to have free use of another Toyota vehicle until such time as Toyota figures out what went wrong and how to fix it.

Toyota offers to buy back recalled bZ4X fully electric SUV from customers | A headline writer’s dream. Toyota’s first full #EV recalled and a buyback offer literally because the wheels keep falling off! How can a car maker get something so basic, so wrong? https://t.co/lDJo4u43Zr pic.twitter.com/n9lcYPTgIo

— Martyn Dews (@Yorkie71) August 8, 2022

As part of that deal, Toyota will pay $5,000 toward an owner’s car payments or as a partial refund. Toyota also said that it will extend the factory warranty on the bZ4X by whatever length of time it becomes before an owner gets her or his vehicle back, according to CNN.

The offer for those who do not sell their vehicle back also includes free EV charging once the owners get the vehicle back and the cost of gasoline for their loaner, according to Autoweek.

It was unclear in the announcement how owners of the vehicle, whose price starts at $43,215, would handle dealer markups, according to Car and Driver.

In June, the company announced that all 2,700 of its new electric bZ4X SUVs were a danger to their drivers, with only 260 to date having been delivered in the United States.

“After low-mileage use, all of the hub bolts on the wheel can loosen to the point where the wheel can detach from the vehicle,” Toyota said in a June 23 statement on its website.

“If a wheel detaches from the vehicle while driving, it could result in a loss of vehicle control, increasing the risk of a crash,” the company said. “The cause of the issue and the driving patterns under which this issue could occur are still under investigation. No one should drive these vehicles until the remedy is performed,” Toyota said.

“No remedy is available at this time,” Toyota said in its June release.

Toyota’s somehow gone from “The best built cars in the world” to “The hub bolts loosen which may cause a wheel to fall off, & almost two months later we don’t know how to fix it”https://t.co/wOJjNc44pW

— Thomas McGuire (@thommcg1980) August 7, 2022

Related:

E-Scooter/Bike Battery Sparks Apartment Blaze, Kills Woman and Child, Leaves Father in Critical Condition

In a column for Bloomberg, Anjani Trivedi, who covers industrial companies in Asia, wrote, “If that’s the level of quality and safety traditional auto giants are willing to commit to, then investors and regulators should increase their scrutiny.”

The bZ4X debuted in Japan in June, according to CNBC.

The company’s president, Akio Toyoda, said in December that Toyota planned “to roll out 30 BEV models by 2030.”

“Toyota has been under pressure to up its game in EVs, so will be very disappointed that a recall has been necessary on its first mass-market electric cars,” David Leggett, automotive editor at GlobalData, told CNBC.

SURPRISE! THE LEFT STILL CAN’T MEME.

Dark Brandon’ is the Biden White House’s cringetastic effort to win back the “Let’s Go Brandon” meme that haunted the perennially COVID-hit President through late 2021 and early 2022. The efforts, shared by taxpayer-funded White House staff, combines an almost year-late rebuttal to the Brandon memes with the Byronic aethestic of the well established “Dark MAGA” movement.

One more problem: it’s extremely ‘Third Reich‘ in nature.

That’s right. On the day the media wants us to buy the idea that Donald Trump demanded his Generals behaved like Nazis, the current White House is actually promoting Nazi memes to hype its passage of the Inflation Recovery Act (IRA). The timing by the White House isn’t bad, to be honest, since the IRA (another irony not lost on us) does in fact empower the U.S. government with a Stormtrooper-style IRS to snoop through your taxes (all at your expense, of course).

But there’s more to this story than the White House using the Reichsadler or Parteiadler in its memes. 

The first thing to note is that this “Dark Brandon” stuff is actually being promoted by corporate media outlets. Check out Slate’s take, which concludes: “If he can muster a smidge of momentum from the al-Zawahiri assassination by pulling up the cowl of Dark Brandon, then that is surely better than whatever he’s got going right now. After all, Joe Biden’s approval rating is already cresting back toward 40 percent. Dark Brandon strikes again!”

MUST READ: REVEALED: CNN, CNBC, AP Met With Chinese Communist Party Propagandists in July.

Sycophantic though Slate may be, the author isn’t wrong. Rasmussen polling has consistently noted that when Biden is away in his basement, hiding from COVID-19, his approval numbers go up. No wonder the White House would rather use cartoon images of him on social media. The left’s pro-Nazi memes are literally more popular than the real Joe Biden.

Mel Magazine – which appears to be some kind of soy-sponsored blog site for, uh, funboys – offers, “Okay, I pledge my soul to Dark Brandon. What’s the worst that could happen? Not like Regular Brandon was doing such a bang-up job. Trust the process. We’re finally winning.”

Sounds totally normal.

Even Rupert Murdoch’s Sun newspaper has been hyping “Dark Brandon,” alongside the Daily Dot, as well as the Independent newspaper (which ironically is hyper-dependent on Russia and Saudi oligarch largesse).

But there’s one more part of the Dark Brandon saga. The cherry on the cake. And that is the aesthetic origin of the entire thing.

“You have this very exaggerated image of a very ‘evil Biden,’ but also, his ability to mobilize these public intellectual zombies in an image is also kind of funny because it has long been China’s accusation of the U.S. government, that the U.S. is using folks like public intellectuals and scholars within China to carry out ‘peaceful evolution,’” Victor Shih, associate professor at UC San Diego, told POLITICO.

That’s right – it comes from China. Specifically, by an artist named Yang Quan, who sought to portray Biden in a negative light in early 2022.

Yes, the pro-Biden memes being disseminated from the hallowed halls of the White House are both Third Reich in nature, and hail from the Chinese Communist Party’s fellow travelers.

MUST READ: EXC: Wuhan Institute of Virology’s ‘Bat Woman’ Is Still Hunting Bats For ‘Recombinant’ Research.

Even when the left tries their very hardest to meme: they end up being utterly, utterly cringe.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has criticized Democrats for pushing their so-called Inflation Reduction Act, which he warns is a “terrible bill.”

The bill will double the size of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). But IRS agents are not designed to go after “billionaires and big corporations,” Cruz said in an interview with Fox News. “They’re designed to come after small businesses and working families across this country … The Democrats are making the IRS bigger than the Pentagon, plus the Department of State, plus the FBI, plus the Border Patrol combined … This is a massive power grab.”

Senate Democrats passed the Inflation Reduction Act on Aug. 7 with a 51 to 50 vote, with Democrat Vice President Kamala Harris casting her tie-breaking vote in favor of her party. The estimated $740 billion package now heads to the House for vote.

Over $300 billion will go to climate change and energy, which is the largest clean energy investment made by a federal government in American history. It also includes tax credits for electric vehicles. The bill institutes a 15 percent minimum tax for corporations making over $1 billion a year.

Cruz warned that the Inflation Reduction Act will “drive up gas prices” and “kill manufacturing jobs.” The bill has “billions in new taxes” charged against U.S. gas and oil production, a decision that will raise gas prices at the pump, he said.

According to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), the bill will “reduce” the U.S. budget deficit.

But a recent report by the Congressional Budget Office (CRO) shows that even though the budget deficit will be lowered by $101.5 billion over a 10-year period, the deficit will actually increase by $24.6 billion in the first six years between 2022 and 2027.

Widespread Criticism

Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Dallas on Saturday, former president Donald Trump warned that the Inflation Reduction Act will worsen inflation, which is already at a four-decade high.

Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) will pay a political price for backing the spending bill, he predicted.

In an Aug. 8 Twitter post, Sen. Masha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) called the $80 billion set aside to double the number of IRS agents as practically giving “every American a personalized tax auditor.”

Instead of increasing taxes, the government should be focusing on reducing them, she insisted. The Democrats’ “socialist agenda” will make the life of Tennesseans “more difficult and expensive.”

“It’s a special kind of stupid to raise taxes during both a recession and inflation—that’s called stagflation, which is what we have right now as a result of Biden’s policies,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) said on Twitter.

There are also worries about the 15 percent book minimum tax affecting small and mid-sized businesses that make below $1 billion a year.

An analysis of the tax rules by Americans for Tax Reform states that the minimum tax will be applicable to any company that has private equity in its capital structure, since the firm will be considered a subsidiary of the private equity firm for tax purposes.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

The San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors this week voted to add a November 2022 ballot measure that would allow the county to secede from California.

The measure, which was voted on 4–0 by the supervisors Wednesday, would ask San Bernardino residents: “Do the citizens of San Bernardino County want the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors to study all options to obtain its fair share of state and federal resources, up to and including secession?”

“Now, that last line is the most controversial,” said Supervisor Curt Hagman during Wednesday’s meeting about the proposal. “It’s a question we’re going to put to our residents. Do they want to include all options to go after [the] fight for their fair share of taxpayer dollars?” he asked.

Over the years, some California counties have evaluated the possibility of seceding from the Golden State due to monetary, cultural, and other differences. In 2016, a failed ballot measure would have split California into six states, while a 2018 proposition that also failed would have created three new states.

But San Bernardino County is the largest county in California and United States, spanning more than 20,000 square miles and home to well over 2 million people. Cities like Fontana, San Bernardino, Victorville, Hesperia, and other municipalities are within its borders, which stretch from Los Angeles County to the California-Nevada and California-Arizona state lines.

Reasons

Supervisor Joe Baca Jr. said he doesn’t want the county to split from California but is interesting in studying whether its residents should receive more state and federal funds.

“I do think we have to look at anything we can do to enhance services for our residents,” Baca said, reported The Herald Sun newspaper. “I’m not in favor of seceding. I’m proud to be from California. I love California.”

Hagman concurred with Baca’s assertion and noted that it would be acceptable “if the worst thing that comes out of this is a study that will be ammunition for our state representatives to fight for more money for us.”

2%40msn.com

“San Bernardino is a large county in both terms of size and population, with many pieces of critical infrastructure,” Barbara Rodriguez, an accountant who assists in state and local fund tax breakdowns, told the California Globe Thursday. “And the people there are feeling like they are being gipped. Like most counties, they are looking for more money coming in, and seeing their county be so low on the list has really incensed them.”

Supervisor Janie Rutherford, meanwhile, said she doesn’t “believe it’s feasible politically or financially to secede from California,” adding, “I absolutely joined with my constituents who have a growing palpable anger about everything.”

Many Californias are dealing with daily problems, including heavy taxes, the nation’s highest gas prices, and widespread homelessness, added Rutherford.

California, she said, has an “ineffective justice system, broken schools, [and] the state’s overreaching counterproductive regulatory schemes, housing and affordability to the ineptness of the state’s preparation for this drought.”

“People pay high taxes, and they do not believe those taxes are coming back to their neighborhoods to address the problems they’re most concerned about,” Rutherford said. “That’s what we heard from our public last week, and there is nothing crazy at all about being angry about those things.”

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

Former President Donald Trump has warned Americans to brace for something “a lot worse than a recession” while blaming the Biden administration’s poor stewardship of the economy for soaring inflation and denouncing the tax hikes in the latest Democrat spending bill.

Trump made the remarks at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Dallas on Saturday, where the former president raised the alarm on the state of the union.

“Our country is being shot. It’s being destroyed,” Trump told attendees, while touting his administration’s record on the economy and national security.

Trump spoke of “creating the most secure border in American history, record tax and regulation cuts, $1.87 gasoline, no inflation, low interest rates, record growth in real wages, record growth in our economy.”

Soaring Inflation, Recession

During Trump’s tenure, the highest the Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation gauge came in at was 2.9 percent in July 2018, while in his final month in office, January 2021, inflation clocked in at 1.4 percent.

Under Biden, inflation has climbed steadily, soaring 9.1 percent year-over-year in June 2022, a figure not seen in more than 40 years.

In his speech, Trump drew a contrast with the economy under Joe Biden, blaming the president for the highest inflation in decades that Trump estimates is costing American families as much as $7,000 a year.

“After the pandemic, we handed the radical Democrats the fastest economic recovery ever recorded, the history of our country, ever recorded,” Trump continued. “They’ve turned that into two straight quarters of negative economic growth, also known, despite their protestation to the contrary, as a recession.”

Two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth are a common rule-of-thumb definition for a recession, although recessions in the United States are officially declared by a committee of economists at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) using a broader definition than the two-quarter rule.

Despite a number of economists arguing that the United States is in a recession based on the two-consecutive-quarters rule, the Biden administration insists that the economy isn’t in a recession, citing NBER’s consideration of a broader range of indicators.

A key argument against recession made by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and others in the Biden administration is that the U.S. labor market remains tight, with unemployment at 3.5 percent and, at 10.7 million, the number of job openings remaining well above the 6 million or so people classified as unemployed.

Worse Than Recession

In his CPAC speech, Trump then issued an ominous warning that, absent a course correction, the recession could spiral into something even worse.

“Just hope that the recession doesn’t turn into a depression, because the way they’re doing things, it could be a lot worse than a recession,” Trump said, echoing similar remarks he made at a rally in Arizona at the end of July, where he warned that “we’re going to have a serious problem” unless political change takes place.

“We got to get this act in order, we have to get this country going, or we’re going to have a serious problem,” Trump said at a rally in Arizona, warning that “we’re going to have a much bigger problem than recession. We’ll have a depression.”

During his appearance at CPAC, Trump issued a call for urgent action at the polls in the upcoming midterms.

“The future of our country is at stake. We don’t have time to wait years and years. We won’t have a country left. What I used to say about Venezuela is true. We have to save the economy, defeat the Biden, Pelosi, Schumer tax hike, which is happening right now tonight,” Trump continued, referring to the so-called “Inflation Reduction Act” that cleared the Senate not long after his speech.

Senators passed the sweeping bill, estimated at $740 billion, in a 51–50 vote on Aug. 7, with the package next going to the House for consideration.

During the deliberations, Senate Democrats rejected an amendment offered by Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) that sought to ban any of the $80 billion for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) from being used to target Americans making less than $400,000 per year.

“My colleagues claim this massive funding boost will allow the IRS to go after millionaires, billionaires and so-called rich ‘tax cheats,’ but the reality is a significant portion raised from their IRS funding bloat would come from taxpayers with income below $400,000,” Crapo said in a statement.

Crapo’s amendment was rejected on a party-line vote, with the Democrat bill including softer language that features a non-binding statement of intention not to squeeze more revenue from America’s middle class.

Tax Hikes

According to an analysis by Americans for Tax Reform, a U.S. advocacy group, the spending bill includes a number of tax hikes on American households and businesses.

This includes a $6.5 billion natural gas tax that ATR says will increase household energy bills, a $12 billion crude oil tax that will end up being passed on to drivers in the form of higher gas prices, and a $52 billion income tax hike on mid-sized and family businesses.

In a separate analysis, ATR said that the Democrat bill’s changes to the book tax threaten small businesses.

Elaborating on that theme, economist and author Antonio Graceffo wrote in an op-ed for The Epoch Times that the so-called “Inflation Reduction Act” would drive up prices for American households.

“Nearly half of these new taxes will be paid by manufacturers, creating disincentives to produce. Diminished industrial output will drive up the cost of goods and reduce the variety and quantity of goods available on store shelves,” Graceffo wrote.

“Beyond the manufacturing sector, the act increases taxes on businesses in general, which, combined with higher interest rates will decrease new investment and hamper job creation. Ultimately, these increased costs will be passed on to customers,” he added.

‘We Have to Win’

During his CPAC speech, Trump revealed what he sees as the key to bringing the country and its economy back on track.

“We have to win an earth-shattering victory in 2022. We have to do it, coming up in November,” Trump said.

“This election needs to be a national referendum on the horrendous catastrophes the radical Democrats have inflicted on our country,” he continued.

“The Republican party needs to campaign on a clear pledge that, if they are given power, they’re going to fight with everything they have to shut down the border, stop the crime wave, beat inflation, and hold the Biden administration accountable. They have to hold it accountable. Job number one for the next Congress,” Trump said.

The national midterm election takes place on Nov. 8, with 34 Senate seats and all 435 House seats up for grabs.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

Supply chain woes have more companies eyeing manufacturing here at home

It wasn’t long ago that Sherman, Texas, might have been best known as the birthplace of Buck Owens, the late country-and-western star, or as the home of Austin College, one of the state’s oldest colleges. More recently, however, the city of nearly 44,000 people located about 65 miles north of Dallas has had something else to brag about: a growing reputation as a center of high-tech manufacturing.

In June, Taiwan-based semiconductor manufacturer GlobalWafers announced plans to build a state-of-the-art, $5 billion silicon wafer factory in Sherman, which beat competing sites in South Korea and Ohio for the facility. The plant will produce advanced, 300-millimeter wafers—which are currently manufactured in Asia—and could support as many as 1,500 jobs over time.

The GlobalWafers announcement came on the heels of Dallas-based Texas Instruments saying that it would put up as many as four new semiconductor (or chip) manufacturing plants in Sherman, potentially investing $30 billion and employing up to 3,000 people. Before selecting the North Texas city, the company had considered Singapore for the facilities, which also will produce 300-millimeter wafers.

The latest developments are a far cry from previous decades in Sherman, when factories there making surgical dressings and automotive glass products were shuttered, with some of the jobs going to other countries.

“We’ve suffered our ups and down,” Sherman Mayor David Plyler said. “But as the economy changed and we started telling our story, things turned. Now folks want to be here.”

Sherman’s success at luring new factories underscores how some cities and towns across the country are enjoying a manufacturing renaissance. That renaissance comes after the United States spent decades shipping manufacturing jobs overseas—mainly to lower-cost suppliers in East Asia, especially China. In 1990, the United States made 37 percent of the world’s computer chips, a figure that since has fallen to about 12 percent. Now, however, some of the manufacturing is coming back, promising communities new jobs and new life.

The return of manufacturing to the United States, known as “reshoring,” got a kick-start in about 2010. But it took on new urgency after COVID-19 lockdowns revealed vulnerabilities in global supply chains. Shipping costs soared and ports were logjammed, resulting in shortages of products ranging from masks and toilet paper to computer chips, which are critical components in everything from smartphones and computers to appliances and automobiles.

“You’ve got by far the most momentum we’ve had at any time in the 12 years we’ve been tracking it,” said Harry Moser, founder and president of the Reshoring Initiative, a nonprofit that promotes the “return-manufacturing-home” message. “Where I’ve had to go to companies in the past and sort of hustle them, now I get more calls from companies saying, ‘I’ve been told we have to get our work out of China and find a source in the U.S. Can you help me find a source?’”

While other kinds of manufacturing are experiencing a U.S. revival as well—there are plans for more than a dozen new electric vehicle battery factories in the South and Midwest, for example—semiconductor plants have taken center stage lately, in part because of the $280 billion CHIPS and Science Act.

The bipartisan measure, which passed the House and Senate last week and was headed to Joe Biden’s desk, provides $52 billion in federal subsidies for domestic chipmaking. Both GlobalWafers and California-based Intel, which plans to build two big semiconductor plants in Licking County, Ohio, had stated that the projects in Sherman and Ohio might not have proceeded as planned unless the legislation was successful. The Biden administration pushed the measure partly on national security grounds, citing U.S. reliance on China for “mature” chips, as well as China’s threats against the island of Taiwan, which the United States has depended on for the most advanced chips.

Offshoring Declines

As recently as the 1970s, the United States had a robust manufacturing sector and balanced trade. The country ran a trade surplus of $8.9 billion in 1975, and manufacturing employment in June 1979 climbed to a record 19.5 million. After that, however, both figures went south. Manufacturing employment plunged to 11.5 million in 2010 before recovering some to 12.5 million in 2021. And the export-import trade balance has been underwater for more than 45 years, with a record deficit of about $860 billion in 2021.

It’s also been about four decades since U.S. companies started “offshoring” jobs overseas. Attracted by the lower cost of labor in Latin America and Asian countries such as China, manufacturers in industries including textiles, steel, and electronics decided to relocate some of their operations there, ostensibly to stay competitive by paring production costs. By 2011, however, an analysis by the Boston Consulting Group was questioning this strategy. The influential consulting firm stated that China’s labor-cost advantage was quickly eroding and predicted that, by 2015, “manufacturing in some parts of the U.S. will be just as economical as manufacturing in China.”

Companies such as Caterpillar and General Electric got the message. Over the past 12 years, the rate of offshoring has declined, while the rate of “reshoring plus foreign direct investment (FDI)” in the United States has been accelerating, Moser said. Combined, the latter two categories were responsible for a record 261,000 manufacturing job announcements last year, up from 6,000 in 2010, he said. That brought the total number of jobs announced because of reshoring and FDI since 2010 to more than 1.3 million.

Most of the jobs came back from Asia. Eliminating the trade deficit by making in the United States what’s currently being imported would result over time in a 40 percent increase in domestic manufacturing, generating 5 million more manufacturing jobs, he said.

The best candidates for reshoring include companies in those manufacturing sectors with high freight costs, volatile demand, frequent design changes, and processes that can be automated, Moser said. Among them are machinery, transportation equipment, appliances, electric batteries, semiconductors, personal protection equipment, pharmaceuticals, and rare earth materials. To help companies better understand the benefits of reshoring, his nonprofit has developed something called a “Total Cost of Ownership Estimator” (TCO). The TCO is a free online tool that calculates the “true” total cost of outsourced products, including such factors as overhead, balance sheets, corporate strategy—and risk.

Risks such as the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s war on Ukraine pale in comparison to the risk of China “decoupling,” which these days hangs over companies like the sword of Damocles, according to Moser.

“I tell companies, ‘Figure out what you can bring back now, and get it back here now—or if you have to, get it to Mexico,” he said. “Because if the [expletive] hits the fan and nothing is coming from China to anyone, you’re going to be one of 30,000 companies trying to find a foundry or a machine shop, and you’re not going to get it.”

Hitendra Chaturvedi, a professor of supply chain management at Arizona State University, agrees that Mexico is a good alternative location for U.S. companies exiting China. “Nearshoring” from China to Mexico—as well as to Latin America and Canada—would make supply more accessible, he said. And manufacturing in Mexico is about 20 percent cheaper than in China.

Besides considering the advantages of nearshoring, Chaturvedi suggested a more targeted approach to reshoring itself.

“We should not take a shotgun approach to this,” he said. “You don’t want low-paying sewing jobs coming back to the U.S. You want high-paying jobs. I want us to focus strategically on sectors that we want to onshore.”

‘Just Getting Started’

For its part, Sherman attracted the two new chip facilities with incentives such as tax abatements, in Texas Instruments’ case, and a package of cash, cheap land, and other breaks for GlobalWafers. The Taiwan-based company also received a $15 million grant from the Texas Enterprise Fund, the state’s “deal-closing” fund, and is eligible for more incentives under the CHIPS Act. The CHIPS subsidies should also benefit Texas Instruments’s Sherman projects (as well as South Korea-based Samsung’s plans to build multiple semiconductor plants in the Austin area).

Plyler said his city also touted its ample workforce, abundant water supply, “business-friendly” approach, and diversified economy. Among the city’s top employers are Tyson Foods, beverage company Sunny Delight, and II-VI, a high-tech optical firm and Apple supplier.

“We’ve taken a lot of hassles out of City Hall for developers and people who want to come in and start a business,” he said. “We walk them through the process of getting permitted, sometimes in a fast-track manner. Making that process easy goes a long way in getting some of these projects off the ground.”

As a result of Sherman’s success, smaller towns around the city are preparing to accommodate the Texas Instruments and GlobalWafers workers with new housing, and industrial facilities for high-tech suppliers and vendors “are really hopping” in the region, the Dallas Business Journal reported.

“We’re expecting a lot of businesses to fill in,” Plyler said. “We’re expecting a lot of new restaurants, a lot of quality-of-life improvements. I think we’re just getting started.”

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

The Senate approved the Democrats’ sweeping health care and climate bill on Aug. 7 in a 51–50 vote, with Vice President Kamala Harris casting the tiebreaking vote.

The estimated $740 billion package next goes to the House for consideration.

“It’s been a long, tough and winding road, but at last, at last we have arrived,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said. “The Senate is making history. I am confident the Inflation Reduction Act will endure as one of the defining legislative measures of the 21st century.”

Senators engaged in a round-the-clock marathon of voting that began on Aug. 6 and stretched into the afternoon of Aug. 7. Democrats voted against some three dozen Republican amendments to the legislation.

The bill ran into trouble midday over objections to a 15 percent corporate minimum tax that was disliked by private equity firms and other industries, forcing last-minute changes.

“It will close tax loopholes and it will reduce and reduce the deficit,” Schumer said. “It will help every citizen in this country and make America a much better place.”

Americans for Tax Reform (ATR), a U.S. advocacy group, stated that the measure will increase taxes on thousands of mid-sized small businesses across the United States.

“Any business that has [private equity] in its capital structure is now considered a subsidiary of that firm and thus subject to 15 percent book tax,” John Kartch, a spokesman for ATR, wrote on Twitter.

“As written, the provision now appears restructured to define any company with private equity in its capital structure to be considered a subsidiary of that private equity firm for purposes of the tax,” the group said in a statement. “This means that these companies would now be swept up in the new 15 percent tax on book income. This provision would greatly expand the reach of the book minimum tax to apply to small and midsize companies that require capital investment to grow their business.”

Concerns over objections to the corporate minimum tax on private equity firms and other industries threatened to slow the progress.

Republicans said the measure would undermine an economy that policymakers are struggling to keep from plummeting into recession. They said the bill’s business taxes would hurt job creation and force prices skyward, making it harder for people to cope with the nation’s worst inflation since the 1980s.

“Democrats have already robbed American families once through inflation, and now their solution is to rob American families a second time,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said on the floor.

Spending and tax increases in the legislation would eliminate jobs while having an insignificant impact on inflation and climate change, the Kentucky Republican said.

Starting late on Aug. 6, the Senate began its so-called “vote-a-rama” that comes before the final passage in the Senate’s budget reconciliation process. Democrats used the process to pass the bill along party lines so as to avoid the 60-vote filibuster, and Harris served as a tiebreaker on several amendments in the 50–50 Senate.

More Details

The bill came to the floor about a week after Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) announced he came to an agreement with Schumer in what is believed to be an attempt to boost Democrats’ and Biden’s chances during the 2022 midterms amid months of negative polling. Biden’s original climate and social measure collapsed after it was opposed by Manchin, who said it was too costly and would fuel inflation.

“The Inflation Reduction Act is the product of years of bipartisan conversations about the most impactful ways to produce more energy domestically, bring down energy and healthcare costs and pay down our debt. The IRA achieves this without raising taxes,” Manchin wrote on Twitter.

Around the same time, the West Virginia Democrat said he would vote down GOP amendments.

“Despite this, my [Republican] friends have made clear they’re completely unwilling to support this bill under any condition. None of their amendments would change that,” Manchin said.

Meanwhile, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) offered amendments to further expand the legislation’s health benefits, and those efforts were defeated. Most votes were forced by Republicans and many were designed to make Democrats look soft on issues such as U.S.–Mexico border security, gasoline and energy costs, and like bullies for wanting to strengthen IRS tax law enforcement.

Late on Aug. 6, Sanders said the measure won’t reduce inflation and said it also doesn’t go far enough with its climate-related measures.

“I want to take a moment to say a few words about the so-called Inflation Reduction Act’ that we are debating this evening,” he said from the Senate floor. “And I say so-called, by the way, because according to the [Congressional Budget Office], and other economic organizations that study this bill, it will, in fact, have a minimal impact on inflation.

“At a time when the drug companies are enjoying huge profits, the pharmaceutical industry will still be allowed to charge the American people by far the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

UPDATE: This article has been updated to include Sen. Joe Manchin’s full title. 

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

The Senate’s rules expert has approved provisions in a major bill Senate Democrats want to pass soon called the Inflation Reduction Act, according to top Democrats in the body.

Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough ruled that tax incentives for renewable energy and other related provisions can stand, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said.

“I’m especially pleased that our prevailing wage provisions were approved,” Wyden said in a statement. “These provisions guarantee wage rates for clean energy projects. Clean energy jobs will be good-paying jobs.”

Another piece that would enable Medicare to negotiate the price of prescription drugs with pharmaceutical companies was also cleared, according to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.).

“This is a major victory for the American people,” Schumer said.

Medicare is a health insurance program run by the federal government that primarily covers people aged 65 and older. About 64 million people are covered by the program.

Private insurers are already allowed to negotiate prices with drug companies.

MacDonough did strike down another portion of the bill, which would have essentially forced companies not to raise prices higher than inflation.

“While there was one unfortunate ruling … in that the inflation rebate is more limited in scope, the overall program remains intact and we are one step closer to finally taking on Big Pharma and lowering Rx drug prices for millions of Americans,” Schumer said.

Additional portions have not yet been fully vetted.

All Democrats Support Bill

The mammoth $433 billion bill has the backing of all 50 Democrats in Congress after swing Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) threw their support behind the legislation.

“We have agreed to remove the carried interest tax provision, protect advanced manufacturing, and boost our clean energy economy in the Senate’s budget reconciliation legislation,” Sinema, the last Democrat to announce her support, said in a statement this week. “Subject to the Parliamentarian’s review, I’ll move forward.”

Joe Biden and other Democrats have said the bill will help Americans save money, but experts are divided on the potential impact.

The bill is aimed at reducing energy costs, transitioning to “cleaner production” by incentivizing solar and other alternative forms of production, lowering health care premiums, increasing taxes on the rich, and reducing the deficit to “fight inflation,” according to Democrats.

Most Republicans appear opposed to the bill.

“Congressional Democrats are pushing a massive tax-and-spend proposal that will crush Americans already struggling under record-high inflation. Cutting wasteful spending would ease inflation. Spending more money will only make it worse,” Rep. Guy Reschenthaler (R-Pa.) said in a statement.

“If a truth-in-advertising law were applied to the ‘Inflation Reduction Act,’ Democrats would be guilty. Their proposal would do nothing to tame inflation,” added Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.).

Democrats hold a majority in the upper chamber because the party controls the White House. That means, in the event of a 50–50 tie, Vice President Kamala Harris can cast a tiebreaking vote.

Schumer has said the Senate will vote on Aug. 6 to advance the bill, triggering hours of debate. A final vote can happen as soon as Sunday.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

Sen. Maggie Hassan plays up her appeal to independents. NH voters say she’s a reliable vote for the Biden admin.

MANCHESTER, N.H. — Sen. Maggie Hassan’s reelection campaign ads tout that the Granite State Democrat is the “most bipartisan” lawmaker in the Senate. But state residents across the political spectrum say they consider Hassan a reliable vote for the Biden administration.

Sean Chambers, a 43-year-old construction worker and registered independent, said Hassan’s time in the Senate has been “nothing but broken promises.” He said he has yet to decide on whether he will vote Republican in November but refuses to back Hassan.

“She says she’s for the worker but hasn’t done anything,” Chambers told the Washington Free Beacon. “I don’t buy the bipartisan talk. There’s a big divide and nothing is getting done.”

Hassan won her seat in 2016 by just about 1,000 votes in a $120 million campaign battle largely focused on her appeal to independents, who make up roughly 40 percent of the state’s registered voters. Her reelection campaign is set to be equally competitive as residents grow frustrated with the Biden administration’s handling of the economy—only one-fifth of state residents want Joe Biden to seek reelection in 2024, according to a University of New Hampshire poll released last month.

Hassan has attempted to distance herself from the Democratic Party establishment, but New Hampshire voters who spoke to the Free Beacon, including Republicans, Democrats, and independents, share the view that the Democratic senator is a reliable supporter of the White House’s agenda.

Al Macaloan, a retired project manager and an independent who voted for Biden in 2020, said he will vote for the New Hampshire Democrat, who has voted with the president 96 percent of the time, for just this reason.

“In the present environment I don’t think you can be bipartisan,” Macaloan told the Free Beacon. “I would like to see it, but it’s not possible.”

Democrats and their allies are prepared to make the race a top spending target: Hassan has raised $26 million, including $3.2 million in individual contributions between April and June alone—88 percent of which came from out of state. These funds helped her launch a series of campaign ads in recent weeks that tout her “bipartisan” record on issues such as small businesses and federal budgets. Hassan declared in one campaign ad that “fiscal responsibility is the New Hampshire way.”

The ad comes after the senator voted to pass Biden’s American Rescue Plan and infrastructure bill, which total more than $3 trillion in spending. She also backed the $739 billion climate spending bill that gained traction with Democrats in recent weeks. Many economists point to these price tags as sources of the four-decade-high inflation rate—an issue that led two-thirds of voters in the state to disapprove of Biden’s economic policies.

Hassan said in another ad that she is “taking on members of my own party to push a gas tax holiday” and “pushing Joe Biden to release more of our oil reserves.”

But as governor, Hassan signed a gas tax increase in 2014 and proposed a budget in 2015 to increase taxes and fees by $100 million, the New Hampshire Journal reported. As a senator, she voted against former president Donald Trump’s tax cuts in 2017, which saved an average of $1,400 for New Hampshire residents.

The Hassan campaign did not respond to requests for comment.

T.J. Duffy, a 26-year-old U.S. Postal Service driver, plans to vote for Republicans up and down the ballot in November. Hassan’s campaign message, he said, is a desperate reversal to appeal to blue-collar workers in the state.

“If you’re going to vote one way for the majority, it’s pretty unfair to say you’re bipartisan,” Duffy told the Free Beacon. “The people who don’t see gas prices as an issue don’t drive to work every single day.”

Hassan’s campaign message relies in part on her award from the Lugar Center, which in May crowned her the “most bipartisan” senator in 2021. The organization noted that Hassan rallied a Republican cosponsor on all 48 bills she introduced last year. Only two of these bills passed, though, both of them directing the Department of Health and Human Services to bolster public health programs.

Danielle Ovellette, a 32-year-old waitress, wore a “fuck Trump” bracelet as she served several Trump supporters last week at Ryan’s Place, a veteran-themed diner in Epping, N.H. Ovellette supported Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) in the 2020 presidential primary and refused to vote for Biden in the general election. She said she plans to vote for Hassan because of her support for a progressive agenda.

“You vote for what’s best for you,” Ovellette told the Free Beacon.

Polling data show Hassan has a narrow lead against her potential Republican challengers. Hassan ran a series of campaign ads that criticize the Republican candidates’ pro-life records after the overturn of Roe v. Wade in June. The New Hampshire primary is not until Sept. 13—a little more than a month before the election.

Paul Lessard, a 58-year-old former New Hampshire Department of Transportation employee born and raised in Manchester, N.H., said Hassan’s bipartisan message will fall flat come Election Day.

“She’s full of shit,” Lessard, a registered Republican, told the Free Beacon. “She only sides with Democrats.”

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

Manchin-backed Inflation Reduction Act would more than double agency’s size

If Democrats have their way, one of the most detested federal agencies—the Internal Revenue Service—will employ more bureaucrats than the Pentagon, State Department, FBI, and Border Patrol combined.

Under the Inflation Reduction Act negotiated by Sen. Joe Manchin (D., W.Va.), the agency would receive $80 billion in funding to hire as many as 87,000 additional employees. The increase would more than double the size of the IRS workforce, which currently has 78,661 full-time staffers, according to federal data.

The additional IRS funding is integral to the Democrats’ reconciliation package. A Congressional Budget Office analysis found the hiring of new IRS agents would result in more than $200 billion in additional revenue for the federal government over the next decade. More than half of that funding is specifically earmarked for “enforcement,” meaning tax audits and other responsibilities such as “digital asset monitoring.”

That would make the IRS one of the largest federal agencies. The Pentagon houses roughly 27,000 employees, according to the Defense Department, while a human resources fact sheet says the State Department employs just over 77,243 staff. The FBI employs approximately 35,000 people, according to the agency’s website, and Customs and Border Protection says it employs 19,536 Border Patrol agents.

The money allocated to the IRS would increase the agency’s budget by more than 600 percent. In 2021, the IRS received $12.6 billion.

Although Democrats say the hiring of additional IRS agents will help root out tax cheats and other criminals, federal tax revenues have steadily risen over the past several decades. Federal tax receipts are projected to hit $5.7 trillion in 2027, up from just over $4 trillion last year without additional IRS agents.

But the roughly $450 billion in new spending proposed by Democrats requires new funding mechanisms. Some of the new spending includes $161 billion for clean electricity tax credits and $64 billion in new Affordable Care Act subsidies.

The majority of new revenue from IRS audits and scrutiny will come from those making less than $200,000 a year, according to a study from the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation. The committee found that just 4 to 9 percent of money raised will come from those making more than $500,000, contrary to Democrats’ claims that new IRS agents are necessary to target millionaires and billionaires who hide income.

Senate Republicans argue that the roughly $45 billion the bill puts towards hiring IRS agents could be better spent on other priorities, such as helping students rebound from the learning loss suffered during COVID school closures. A proposal by Sen. Tim Scott (R., S.C.) would amend the spending bill to put the IRS money towards education tax credits.

“When faced with the decision to spend $45 billion on America’s largest revenue collection agency, or give it back to parents to help them get their kids the help they need, the Senate needs to choose the latter option every single time,” Scott told the Free Beacon.

The Washington Free Beacon previously reported that, despite White House claims to the contrary, the Inflation Reduction Act does little to combat inflation. A report from Moody’s Analytics found the Democratic bill will shave just .33 percent from the Consumer Price Index over the next decade.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) used COVID-19 for biological warfare, according to a new report by nine experts with the Center for Security Policy (CSP).

Generals, medical experts, and foreign policy experts including former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Pete Hoekstra and former Deputy Under Secretary of Defense Lieutenant General William “Jerry” Boykin contributed to the report, which is available in book form on Amazon.

The report, titled “The CCP is at War with America,” stated that there is no evidence COVID-19 was a natural virus, arguing that there is significant evidence it came from a CCP lab. It also stated that the CCP deliberately allowed the virus to spread worldwide by allowing international flights while locking down movement within China.

The CSP describes the report as an “exercise in competitive analysis that strongly challenges the Director of National Intelligence’s September 2021 conclusion.”

The Plague War

U.S. intelligence experts in 2021 concluded that they might never know for certain where COVID-19 came from. But the CSP put the blame squarely on the Chinese communist regime.

“The preponderance of evidence indicates that SARS-CoV-2 was lab-manufactured,” the report stated. “In any event, Beijing acted with murderous intent in spreading the disease beyond China’s borders.”

As proof of these claims, the report pointed to genetic features of COVID-19 not found in natural viruses. It noted that China’s military has a biological warfare program.

Finally, it highlighted that the Chinese regime restricted internal travel to stop the spread of COVID-19 but kept its international borders open. At the same time, it bought up global supplies of personal protective gear.

Even if the original release of the virus was an accident, its worldwide spread was intentional, the report stated. The likely motive was to ensure that the rest of the world would be set back economically by the virus to the same degree China would be.

“Xi’s regime clearly saw the imperative need to ensure that it would not suffer economic privation alone, to the advantage of its enemies, especially the United States,” the report read. “Actively spreading the virus was, thus, a means of waging economic warfare, and the Chinese Communists applied themselves to doing so with a vengeance.”

According to the report, the CCP worked to spread its COVID-19 quarantine policies around the world so it could weather the pandemic at an advantage. The damage COVID-19 measures did to America’s economy put the CCP ahead.

“A principal beneficiary of such economic trauma would be the Chinese Communist Party,” the report read.

Weapons of Choice

The report also stated that the Chinese regime has a history of biological warfare. In the early 1990s, Chinese general Chi Haotian told China’s biological weapons program that it should depopulate America so China could take it over, according to the report. But China kept these plans secret.

“Right now, it is not the time to openly break with [America],” the general said. “Our reform and opening to the outside world still rely on their capital and technology.”

Biological weapons could be China’s road to world domination, the report stated. Chinese military journals have openly published articles about genetically-targeted biological warfare. China has collected genetic profiles of foreigners while keeping a close guard on the genetic profiles of Chinese people, it added.

“If Chinese scientists succeed in designing pathogens targeting only foreigners, the next germ, virus, or microbe from China could end non-Chinese societies,” the report stated.

“Xi will be the first supremo to possess a weapon making worldwide Chinese rule possible,” it read.

The report suggested that COVID-19 fatalities outside China should be considered “murder victims.”

The paper offered several conclusions. These include that the CCP and any who colluded with it must be held accountable for the pandemic’s results; the government shouldn’t impose vaccine mandates on the vulnerable; the United States should develop deterrents against Chinese bioweapons; and future medical health measures shouldn’t follow Chinese totalitarian lockdown advice.

“We must never again allow our constitutional freedoms to be denied on the pretext of a public health emergency, especially at the insistence of foreign powers, let alone our mortal enemy,” the report stated.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

Democrat Logic: Spend hundreds of billions of dollars to reduce inflation. Are you F-ing kidding me?! [US Patriot]

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) has reached a deal with Democrats over a multi-pronged spending package that lawmakers say would reform the tax code, lower the federal deficit, lower health care costs, and invest in energy and climate change programs.

The spending package appeared to be a revised, alternate version to the Build Back Better (BBB) bill, which would fulfill a major agenda of Joe Biden.

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) previously announced on July 27 that he had reached a deal with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) on energy, taxes, and health care to advance the bill, which is dubbed the “Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.”

Sinema, who previously held out on the deal, said in an announcement on Thursday she would support moving forward with the measure and begin debate on the bill.

“We have agreed to remove the carried interest tax provision, protect advanced manufacturing, and boost our clean energy economy in the Senate’s budget reconciliation legislation,” Sinema said. “Subject to the Parliamentarian’s review, I’ll move forward.”

Sinema was referring to a provision that would have closed the so-called carried interest loophole and generate an estimated $14 billion in new revenue over the next 10 years. The loophole is said to help wealthy private equity and hedge fund managers pay less taxes.

She was also separately referring to an agreement to protect manufacturing from the impact of a proposed 15 percent corporate minimum tax, which opponents say would jeopardize economic growth.

“Following this effort, I look forward to working with [Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.)] to enact carried interest tax reforms, protecting investments in America’s economy and encouraging continued growth while closing the most egregious loopholes that some abuse to avoid paying taxes,” the Arizona senator said, referring to tax concerns that affect hedge funds.

Schumer said in a statement on Thursday that the agreement “preserves the major components” of the original bill, which includes “reducing prescription drug costs, fighting climate change, closing tax loopholes exploited by big corporations and the wealthy, and reducing the deficit by $300 billion.”

“I am pleased to report that we have reached an agreement on the Inflation Reduction Act that I believe will receive the support of the entire Senate Democratic conference,” he also said. “I have had many productive discussions with members of our conference over the past three days and we have addressed a number of important issues they have raised.”

Schumer said the final version of the bill will be introduced on Saturday.

The Democratic leader seeks to pass the measure through a procedural tool called “reconciliation” that allows a bill related to taxes, spending, and debt to be passed in the chamber by a simple majority rather than having to pass the 60 vote filibuster threshold. The reconciliation process also limits debate on the bill to 20 hours. That could allow the bill to be passed with only Democratic votes, if necessary, if every Democrat is on board.

The bill is expected to include about $370 billion on energy and climate programs and $64 billion to extend subsidies for Affordable Care Act premiums for three years through 2025.

It also seeks generate about $700 billion in new revenue over the next 10 years, which would leave roughly $300 billion in deficit reduction.

A large portion of the $700 billion—an estimated $313 billion—is expected to be generated by increasing the corporate minimum tax to 15 percent, while the remaining amounts include $288 billion in prescription drug pricing reform and $124 billion in Internal Revenue Service tax enforcement.

Support of All 50 Democrats in Senate

Sinema’s announcement means all 50 Democrats in the 50–50 split Senate will support the measure. Democrats hold a majority due to Vice President Kamala Harris’s tie-breaking vote.

Biden said in a statement from the White House released late Thursday that “we’ve taken another critical step toward reducing inflation and the cost of living for America’s families,” adding, “I look forward to the Senate taking up this legislation and passing it as soon as possible.”

In a Twitter post on Thursday afternoon, Schumer said the legislation “will be the largest package to fight the climate crisis ever passed by Congress.”

“Republicans want to take away people’s health care, cut taxes for the rich, put Medicare and Social Security on the chopping block, raise taxes on working families,” he said in a separate Twitter post. “Democrats are working to lower inflation, lower Rx drug costs, close tax loopholes exploited by big businesses.”

Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) signaled opposition to the spending package.

“Even the Democrats’ favorite estimate says their so-called inflation bill will take nine years to cut the same amount of inflation that our country added every week in June,” he wrote on Twitter on Aug. 3. “Nine years of huge tax hikes and big spending to remove literally one week’s worth of inflation. A joke.”

“Democrats want to raise families’ electricity, gas, and heating bills so they can send rich people rebates for buying $80,000 electric cars. New taxes on American oil and gas,” he said in another Twitter post. “Costly virtue signaling with no meaningful emissions impact as China keeps emitting more and more.”

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

The German government may tax individuals with high carbon footprints at heavier rates than their fellow, eco-friendly citizens.

Activities that could trigger a higher tax rate, as reported by German media outlets, include driving gasoline-powered or large cars, engaging in frequent air travel, and living in a large place of residence.

The policy enjoys support from the country’s left-wing Federal Minister for Economic Affairs and Climate Protection Robert Habeck, who recently floated a “climate tax” on new car registrations, according to a strategy paper by the government agency obtained by the German news outlet Handelsblatt.

The government described the tax initiative as “a CO2-dependent climate tax for new car registrations,” so “as a result, e-cars are cheaper than the respective combustion cars.”

Katrin Göring-Eckardt, Vice President of Germany’s federal parliament, echoed the proposal, emphasizing how basing taxes on citizens’ environmental impact was imperative to advancing the goals of “social justice.”

As newspaper Die Welt explained in reference to Eckardt’s proposal:

“Therefore, in the future, those who cause a particularly large amount of climate-damaging CO2 should be taxed more heavily – for example with a large apartment, two cars or permanent air travel, she demanded. “A temporary wealth levy would also be conceivable. We need a new justice contract.” In the future, social justice will no longer be separate from climate justice, said Göring-Eckardt.”

“Companies have to check whether they can turn down the heating and air conditioning in the offices and workshops. The same applies to public buildings, golf clubs or fun pools,” added Göring-Eckardt, who also blamed the potential levying of new taxes on the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine.

“The climate crisis will demand many more restrictions from us,” she emphasized.

The German government floating a potential environmental tax follows concern over left-wing and globalist advocacy groups such as the World Economic Forum (WEF) exploiting COVID-19 and the climate to implement their “Great Reset” agenda.  The group seeks to abolish property ownership at its core, summarizing this objective through its controversial expression “you will own nothing and be happy.”

Democrats and Republicans need to rein in spending: Heritage Foundation’s Joel Griffith

With raging inflation and the Democrat-led Congress gathering enough Senate support to pass billions more in spending, Joel Griffith, a research fellow in the Thomas A. Roe Institute for economic policy studies at The Heritage Foundation, told NTD TV that if the United States does not rein in its irresponsible fiscal actions, the nation is headed for a worse economic crisis.

Griffith said that raising taxes on the wealthy will not get the federal government out of the financial hole it’s dug for itself over the past few decades, particularly the spending that’s occurred in the last two years.

“The only way to pay for all this would be to print the money, to borrow the money, or to raise taxes on the middle class. There’s no easy way out of this,” Griffith said during the interview. “And politicians don’t have an appetite to correct the problem. So, there’s going to be a crisis if we do not correct our ways. It’s just a matter of time.”

By technical definition, the United States already has entered a recession, but the Biden administration continues to deny the facts.

“Everybody loves the goodies, and now we’re suffering the consequences. And it’s so important for people to realize that the economic misery that we’re feeling right now is directly related to the mistakes that were made in the past two years, with shutdowns, with spending, and with printing,” said Griffith.

The U.S. government’s debt now amounts to more than $30 trillion, which calculates to $100,000 per person, and with current interest rates, it’s an additional $1,000 in debt, per person, being added each year, said Griffith.

Democrats’ ‘Inflation Reduction’ Bill

Senators Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) announced on July 27 that they had enough votes to pass a measure called the “Inflation Reduction Act of 2022” (pdf), which seeks to spend some $433 billion—about $369 billion toward energy and climate programs over the next 10 years, and $64 billion toward extending federal subsidies for three more years for some people buying private health insurance.

Meanwhile, many from both sides of the aisle viewed Manchin as a fiscal moderate who would not opt for further government spending, especially during a recession.

Griffith, however, said that he is not surprised by Manchin supporting liberal legislation that will expand the federal government, and hurt his own state of West Virginia, because he has observed that the senator supports liberal policies.

“We know what [Manchin has] supported in the past. And he has been for expanding the size and the scope of government. So I’m disappointed that he has agreed to a package that is going to dramatically increase taxes on businesses, [that] it’s going to actually include more taxes on fossil fuels. And it’s going to even further socialize our health care sector,” said Griffith.

The U.S. consumer is already paying, via taxes and inflation, the trillions of dollars the government spent and printed in the name of pandemic relief, said Griffith. This new package will only make the economy worse off.

“We are suffering through the consequences of too much spending … and to see the Senate now moving forward on a package that’s going to increase taxes and increase [the] costs on fuel production,  it’s unfortunate,” said Griffith.

Not Putin’s Fault

Griffith said for a family with a middle-class income, “We’ve seen your real take-home pay decline by more than $6,000 annually because of all this inflation.”

And even if inflation were to revert to normal tomorrow, about 2 percent annually, it will not negate the economic damage, only lessen it for the future, he said.

“Putting the blame on [Putin] and his actions in the war in Ukraine for rising prices—that’s simply, largely untrue,” said Griffith.

Gas prices were already on the rise long before Russian President Putin invaded Ukraine, said Griffith, adding, “Same thing goes with our food costs, commodity costs, fertilizer costs—all of those were rapidly increasing long before Putin decided to invade Ukraine.”

“Let’s remember, it was our own politicians who shut down our economy. It was our own Congress in the United States that voted to spend $6 trillion that we don’t have. And it was our central bank, our Federal Reserve, that printed $6 trillion out of thin air. That is what is largely responsible for this inflation, not Vladimir Putin,” said Griffith.

Another contributing factor to the poor economy is an aspect of the employment rate called the participation rate (i.e., the percentage of people who are working age and are either working or looking for work), which more accurately describes who is working, said Griffith.

“The [participation rate] is near generational lows. In fact, if we were to have a participation rate that would have remained steady over the past three years … it shows that more than a million people have actually dropped out of our workforce entirely.”

“That’s part of the reason why if you go to a restaurant, a bar, a retail store, you notice the service isn’t so good right now,” added Griffith. “And that’s because relative to our overall population, we have fewer people working today than there were just two and a half years ago.”

There has been some increase in the participation rate in the United States, said Griffith, because “as people draw down on those savings [accumulated during the time when the government was doling out pandemic relief funds], they’re finding it necessary to return to the workforce.”

Middle-Class Most Impacted

Griffith said the money the government is spending is coming from the taxpayer and that this will affect the middle-class the most because they won’t be able to save and “build wealth” because of the current and rampant inflation.

“And that’s what I’m very fearful of—that as we continue to spend far beyond our means, that it’s not just going to have an impact this year, and next year, [but] 10 years and 15 years from now, [and] we’re going to see even fewer opportunities [like the creation of new jobs] for typical American families,” said Griffith.

Mimi Nguyen Ly contributed to this report.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

If Republicans aggressively communicate the details of the Manchin-Schumer bill, it will become prohibitively expensive for any Democrats to vote for it.

During the August break, every Republican House and Senate candidate should challenge their Democrat opponents to defend the new, destructive, and unpopular Joe Manchin-Chuck Schumer bill.

Democrats hope to camouflage the bill by calling it the “Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.” In the business world, this title would lead to a lawsuit over false advertising. As I wrote in my latest best-selling book, “Defeating Big Government Socialism,” this kind of dishonest branding is standard procedure for the Orwellian party that modern Democrats have become. An accurate title of the bill would be the “Higher Taxes, Bigger IRS, and More Inflation Act of 2022.”

If Republicans aggressively communicate the details of the Manchin-Schumer bill, it will become prohibitively expensive for any Democrats to vote for it.

Scott Rasmussen highlighted the American public’s opposition to this bill once it is accurately explained. In a poll this weekend, Rasmussen discovered that 55 percent of Americans favor cutting government spending and taxes, while only 23 percent favor higher taxes and spending. Just on this overview Republican candidates will have a more than 2:1 majority opposing higher taxes and bigger spending. And by 44 percent to 17 percent Americans believe higher taxes and government spending will increase inflation.

According to Rasmussen, “when told half the tax burden will fall on manufacturing industries, 63% say it is likely to make supply chain problems worse.” Only 19 percent of Americans think the bill’s so-called book tax will not affect the supply chain. I would add that increasing taxes on our manufacturing industries when we are competing with China is totally backward-thinking – and virtually suicidal in terms of national security.

Democrats should also take notice: The pain caused by the bad energy policies supported in the bill is undermining support for green policies. Some 66 percent of Americans now think reducing the price of gas is more important than reductions carbon emissions.

In fact, according to Rasmussen, 46 percent say more spending on climate change and clean energy programs will increase the price of gasoline, while only 21 percent think it will lower the price of gas.

When told the new Manchin-Schumer bill will lead to 86,000 additional Internal Revenue Service agents (the IRS currently has 78,661 full-time staff) the American people oppose it by 53 percent to 31 percent. But the intensity factor is huge. Some 29 percent strongly oppose the plan while only 9 percent strongly favor it. That is a more than 3:1 opposition at the extremes.

When people realize most of these IRS agents will not be going after billionaires and big companies – but instead will be auditing waitresses, uber drivers, self-employed people, and small businesses – I expect the opposition will grow even more intense.

As Rasmussen described it, “The new legislation being considered would double the size of the IRS so that the agency can conduct audits on an additional 1.2 million taxpayers every year. The agency has set a goal of increasing the audits of small business owners by 50%.”

Finally, despite the Democrats’ deeply dishonest title, the bill will increase the rate of inflation in the near term – not reduce it.

As the Daily Wire reported, the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania found that the bill “could lead to a slight increase in inflation over the next two years.” While the bill is expected to eventually reduce inflation after 2024, the Wharton School study found: “These point estimates are statistically indistinguishable from zero, thereby indicating low confidence that the legislation will have any impact on inflation.” So, not only will the bill increase inflation over the next few years, it will ultimately have no impact long-term.

The Manchin-Schumer bill is an enormous opportunity for Republicans – and a genuine learning moment for the American people.

It is crystal clear that the current economic performance failures of the Democrats are caused by the underlying destructive policies they promote. Further, Republicans should also clearly expose the consistently dishonest and hypocritical language Democrats use to try to fool Americans.

Every Republican candidate for House and Senate should challenge his or her Democratic opponent to a series of focused debates during the August recess. Republicans should assert that the Manchin-Schumer bill is a higher tax, bigger IRS, more inflation bill which will be bad for America. Every Democrat should be made to debate the point.

When Democrats try to hide behind the bill’s phony title and dishonest talking points, Republicans should be ready to challenge them on substance with clear examples.

Republican Georgia Senate Nominee Herschel Walker has already challenged Sen. Raphael Warnock to defend the bill. After saying for weeks that Walker was afraid to debate, Warnock is now avoiding his opponent.

Take note of every Democrat who refuses to defend the bill. Their reluctance will demonstrate just how bad it is.

This is a great opportunity for Republicans to define the real choice for November.

They should grab it now and not let go.

My blood is boiling.

The Deep State Cabal inside the DOJ and FBI went out of their way to hinder the investigation of Hunter Biden’s laptop just weeks before the 2020 Presidential election. By blocking the disastrous news, it kept America in the dark and aided Biden’s so-called victory.

When America was being distracted with COVID, mandates, lockdowns, and BLM riots, our freedom was being taken away without most people noticing because our government was conspiring against us.

How can we trust our so-called “top law-enforcement” agency to do their job when they actively hid Hunter’s investigation in a RESTRICTED SUBFOLDER on their network?

Now Biden’s handpicked Attorney General has no problem turning a blind eye to the actions of the Biden family. This isn’t just refusing to investigate Hunter’s laptop, this is ACTIVELY HIDING EVIDENCE so no one else would investigate.

That’s why you and I must continue to stand up to them.

If you want to see Hunter investigated and the Big Guy impeached, then I need your URGENT Contribution of $25, $50, or $100 today!

We need to let these Deep State hooligans know that we’re going to do the job they were supposed to do. I’m opening up a congressional investigation into the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop and exposing the criminality of Hunter and the Big Guy. I told you my blood is boiling, right?

If the DOJ didn’t cover up Hunter’s crimes and the intelligence officials didn’t peddle the lie that Hunter’s Laptop was “Russian Disinformation,” Donald Trump might still be President.

The 18-month-long nightmare we all have been living under Biden’s illegitimate reign would not have happened.

No hyper-inflation. No borrowing trillions of dollars to pay for Marxist social programs. No baby formula shortages or selling of oil reserves to Hunter’s friends in China.

That’s what the DOJ took away from us when they covered for the Biden family’s criminal enterprise.

If you’re as upset as I am, then chip in $50, $100, or $250 today to help me investigate and expose the truth behind Hunter’s and the Big Guy’s criminal enterprise… and those who helped cover it up!

Here’s the problem. The Swamp knows I’m a woman of my word. They know that I will not rest until Congress finally investigates Hunter and impeaches Joe Biden.

That’s why they have been working overtime to make sure I’m not in Congress after November. From filing lawsuits to kick me off the ballot to donating millions to my Democrat opponent, I’m having everything AND the kitchen sink thrown at me.

Do you really think Nancy Pelosi has ignored the behavior from AOC and the Jihad Squad by mistake?

Do you think the Democrats accidentally forgot to sanction their own member who gave the middle finger on National TV to GOP Members of Congress at the Congressional Baseball game the other day?

Somehow no one is being held accountable for their actions… except me. Because in Washington, some people do as they’re told while I’m fighting to do what Americans expect from their duly elected Representatives—SERVE THE PEOPLE!

That’s why I URGENTLY need your help to fight back and win this November with your $100, $500, or $1,000 donation today. Otherwise, Hunter and Brandon are going to keep enriching themselves off the backs of the U.S. government and no one will stop them.

But if I win in November, all bets are off.

That’s why we can’t let Hunter and Brandon get away with it simply because I wasn’t there to lead the charge in Congress. Help me win so I can investigate Hunter and impeach Joe Biden! Please donate today.

Thank you. God Bless America.
Marjorie Taylor Greene
Congresswoman (R-GA)

Mandela Barnes won’t say if U.S. is in recession

Wisconsin Democratic Senate candidate Mandela Barnes said the U.S. economy is dealing with “unprecedented growth,” and declined to say if the country is in a recession after six months of declining production, during an interview on Sunday.

Barnes, the presumptive Democratic nominee, tried to put a positive spin on the grim economic news by blaming U.S. economic problems on job creation and a low unemployment rate.

“Are we in a recession?” asked a reporter with WKOW-TV.

“Well, I’ll tell you, we have seen unprecedented growth for a long time right now,” said Barnes.

When asked what he meant by growth, Barnes responded that “growth is what leads to inflation.”

“The fact that we’ve had more job growth, the fact the unemployment rate is so low, the unfortunate reality that oil and gas companies are having record profit years while gas prices continue to rise across the country,” he said.

Barnes’s comments come as the Biden administration has scrambled to redefine the term “recession,” which has been traditionally characterized by two straight quarters of declining GDP.

Barnes is expected to face off against Republican incumbent senator Ron Johnson in the November election, after clearing the Democratic field last week. The Democratic primary is scheduled for next Tuesday.

Barnes, the current Wisconsin lieutenant governor, has had a rocky start when it comes to public speaking. During a major address last week, he said he was running against “Scott Walker,” who he called “one of the worst senators this state has ever had.” Walker is the former governor of Wisconsin who left office in 2019.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

West Virginia senator’s deal provides tens of billions of dollars in electric vehicle tax credits.

Sen. Joe Manchin’s $485 billion budget reconciliation package includes a provision he once called “ludicrous” and counterproductive to fighting inflation, according to a Washington Free Beacon review of the bill.

The deal Manchin struck with Senate Democrats to fight inflation includes tens of billions of dollars worth of electric vehicle tax credits, a policy once considered a non-starter for Manchin. As recently as April, Democrats thought negotiations reached an impasse after he said electric tax credits “make no sense to me whatsoever.”

“There’s a waiting list for EVs right now with a fuel price at $4.00, but they still want us to throw $5,000 or $7,000 or a $12,000 credit to buy an electric vehicle,” Manchin said on the Senate floor. “We can’t produce enough product for the people that want it and we’re still going to pay them to take it. It’s absolutely ludicrous, in my mind.”

Despite those words, the Inflation Reduction Act includes electric vehicle tax credits for up to $7,500 per vehicle. Those tax benefits apply to any family making up to $300,000 and can be used on any electric vehicle that costs up to $80,000.

The electric vehicle provision is the latest reversal for Manchin, who held up Democratic Party spending plans for more than a year over a litany of concerns that have been seemingly tossed aside. Last week, the bipartisan Joint Committee on Taxation concluded that the budget reconciliation package would raise taxes by billions on Americans making less than $200,000. Manchin previously said he would never support tax hikes during a recession, which the U.S. economy entered in July. Why Manchin caved on electric vehicle subsidies is unclear. Manchin said in March that he was “reluctant to go down the path of electric vehicles” over concerns about the ability for manufacturers to meet demand.

“I’m old enough to remember standing in line in 1974 trying to buy gas. I remember those days,” he said. “I don’t want to have to be standing in line waiting for a battery for my vehicle, because we’re now dependent on a foreign supply chain, mostly China.”

Republicans are unanimous in their opposition to the spending package. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell blasted Manchin over hypocrisy last week and called the Inflation Reduction Act a “reckless taxing and spending spree that will delight the far left and hammer working families even harder.”

“They want Americans to be faced with skyrocketing prices and higher taxes and fewer jobs, all at the same time,” McConnell said. “Democrats have outlined a giant package of huge new job-killing tax hikes, Green New Deal craziness that will kill American energy.”

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

President Donald Trump has warned that America’s economy is on track for a bigger disaster than a recession, with his remarks coming shortly before government statistics showed GDP printing negative for the second consecutive quarter, which is a rule-of-thumb definition for a recession.

“Where we’re going now could be a very bad place,” Trump said at a rally in Arizona last week. “We got to get this act in order, we have to get this country going, or we’re going to have a serious problem.”

The former president singled out the collapse in Americans’ real wages, a historically depressed labor force participation rate, and the Democrat push for the Green New Deal that he said would crush economic growth.

“Not recession. Recession’s a nice word. We’re going to have a much bigger problem than recession. We’ll have a depression,” the former president said.

Trump’s remarks came several days before the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) released data showing that real U.S. GDP fell by an annualized 0.9 percent in the second quarter after contracting 1.6 percent in the first quarter.

Two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth are a common rule-of-thumb definition for a recession, although recessions in the United States are officially declared by a committee of economists at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) using a broader definition than the two-quarter rule.

Vance Ginn, Chief Economist at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, told The Epoch Times’ sister media NTD in an interview that, while officially it’s NBER that calls recessions, the two-quarter rule is “usually how it’s done by a rule of thumb.”

“I think this is definitely recession that we’re in now from these bad policies,” Ginn added, blaming a series of “progressive policies” coming out of the White House and the Democrat-controlled House.

Stagflationary Winds Blowing

In his remarks, Trump also took aim at resident Joe Biden’s handling of the economy, blaming him for soaring inflation.

“Biden created the worst inflation in 47 years. We’re at 9.1 percent, but the actual number is much, much higher than that,” Trump said.

While the former president didn’t provide his own estimate for the true rate of inflation, an alternative CPI inflation gauge developed by economist John Williams, calculated according to the same methodology used by the U.S. government in the 1980s, puts the figure at 17.3 percent, a 75-year high.

Trump also said that persistently high inflation combined with an economic slowdown has put the country “on the verge of a devastating” spell of stagflation, which is a combination of accelerating prices and slowing economic growth.

Inflation is “going higher and higher all the time,” Trump said, adding that it’s “costing families nearly $6,000 a year, bigger than any tax increase ever proposed other than the tax increase that they want to propose right now.”

In Trump’s first full month in office in February 2017, the headline Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation gauge came in at 2.8 percent in annual terms. While the CPI measure fluctuated during his tenure, the highest it ever reached was 2.9 percent in July 2018, while in his final month in office, January 2021, inflation clocked in at 1.4 percent.

Under Biden, inflation has climbed steadily, soaring 9.1 percent year-over-year in June 2022, a figure not seen in more than 40 years.

‘War on American Energy’

Soaring energy prices have been one of the key contributing factors to inflation, accounting for around half of the headline inflation figure, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

In his criticism of Biden’s policies, Trump singled out what he called “Biden’s war on American energy” and blamed it for pushing up gasoline prices.

Since taking office, Biden has taken a number of executive actions targeting the oil industry, including rescinding the Keystone XL pipeline permit, halting new oil and gas drilling leases on federal lands and waters, and ending fossil fuel subsidies by some agencies.

The price of gasoline is around double what it was when Biden took office, with the president blaming various factors, including a lack of refining capacity, the war in Ukraine, and corporate greed.

In a bid to lower prices at the pump, Biden ordered the release of oil reserves from the national strategic reserve, called on U.S. refineries to boost output, and pushed OPEC to pump more crude.

In his speech, Trump said this amounted to “begging” other countries to pump more oil instead of trying to ramp up domestic production.

“We have more liquid gold under our feet than any other country in the world. We are a nation that is consumed by the radical left’s Green New Deal, yet everyone knows that the Green New Deal will lead to our destruction.”

“Just two years ago, we were energy-independent. We were even energy-dominant. The United States is now a beggar for energy

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

WASHINGTON (Reuters) — The U.S. economy contracted again in the second quarter amid aggressive monetary policy tightening from the Federal Reserve to combat high inflation, which could fan financial market fears that the economy was already in recession.

Gross domestic product fell at a 0.9% annualized rate last quarter, the Commerce Department said in its advance estimate of GDP on Thursday. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast GDP rebounding at a 0.5% rate.

Estimates ranged from as low as a 2.1% rate of contraction to as high as a 2.0% growth pace. The economy contracted at a 1.6% pace in the first quarter.

The second straight quarterly decline in GDP meets the standard definition of a recession.

But the National Bureau of Economic Research, the official arbiter of recessions in the United States, defines a recession as “a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in production, employment, real income, and other indicators.”

Job growth averaged 456,700 per month in the first half of the year, which is generating strong wage gains. Still, the risks of a downturn have increased. Homebuilding and house sales have weakened while business and consumer sentiment have softened in recent months.

The White House is vigorously pushing back against the recession chatter as it seeks to calm voters ahead of the Nov. 8 midterm elections that will decide whether resident Joe Biden’s Democratic Party retains control of the U.S. Congress.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is scheduled to hold a news conference on Thursday to “discuss the state of the U.S. economy.” While labor market remains tight, there are signs it is losing steam.

A separate report from the Labor Department on Thursday showed initial claims for state unemployment benefits decreased 5,000 to a seasonally adjusted 256,000 for the week ended July 23. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast 253,000 applications for the latest week.

Jobless claims remain below the 270,000-350,000 range that economists say would signal an increase in the unemployment rate. Slowing economic growth could, however, encourage the Fed to step back from hefty interest rate increases, though much would depend on the path of inflation, which is way above the U.S. central bank’s 2% target.

The Fed on Wednesday raised its policy rate by another three-quarters of a percentage point, bringing the total interest rate hikes since March to 225 basis points. Fed Chair Jerome Powell acknowledged the softening economic activity as a result of tighter monetary policy.

(Reporting by Lucia Mutikani. Editing by Chizu Nomiyama.)

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) announced on July 27 that he has reached a deal with Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) on energy, taxes, and health care to advance what appears to be a revised, alternate version to the Build Back Better (BBB) bill.

The new spending package (pdf), now dubbed the “Inflation Reduction Act of 2022,” will “address record inflation by paying down our national debt, lowering energy costs, and lowering healthcare costs,” Manchin said in a lengthy statement.

“For too long, the reconciliation debate in Washington has been defined by how it can help advance Democrats political agenda called Build Back Better. Build Back Better is dead, and instead, we have the opportunity to make our country stronger by bringing Americans together,” he added.

Manchin, a crucial swing vote in the 50–50 split Senate, had for months refused to support the BBB pushed by fellow Democrats that at one point had asked for over $3 trillion in funding. In mid-July, he reportedly killed any hope for a scaled down version of the BBB, telling party leadership he would not support new climate spending or raise taxes from their post-2017 levels.

“The revised legislative text will be submitted to the Parliamentarian for review this evening and the full Senate will consider it next week,” Manchin and Schumer said in a joint statement on July 27.

Schumer seeks to pass the measure through a procedural tool that allows a bill related to taxes, spending, and debt to be passed in the chamber by a simple 51-vote majority rather than having to pass the 60 vote filibuster threshold. The process also limits debate on the bill to 20 hours. That could allow the bill to be passed with only Democratic votes, if necessary—if every Democrat is on board.

Hours after Manchin announced the deal, a spokesperson for Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), a moderate Democrat, told news outlets that her office does not have a comment on the proposed legislation and that she will need to review the text.

Bill Claims to Reduce Federal Deficits by $300 Billion

The two senators said the bill “will make a historic down payment on deficit reduction to fight inflation, invest in domestic energy production and manufacturing, and reduce carbon emissions by roughly 40 percent by 2030.” It will also allow Medicare to negotiate for prescription drugs and lower health care costs for Americans, they added.

A one-page summary (pdf) from Manchin’s office show that the deal will see a total of $433 billion in investments: about $369.75 billion in energy security and climate change programs over 10 years, and $64 billion to extend the expanded Affordable Care Act program for federal subsidies of health insurance, for three years through 2025.

The deal seeks to generate an estimated $739 billion in new revenue over the next 10 years. A large portion of the money—an estimated $313 billion—is expected to be generated by increasing the corporate minimum tax to 15 percent. The remaining amounts include $288 billion in prescription drug pricing reform; $124 billion in Internal Revenue Service tax enforcement; and $14 billion in closing the carried interest loophole.

That would leave over $300 billion to reduce federal deficits over the next 10 years to fight inflation, according to the Democratic senators. The government is projected to rack up trillions in cumulative deficits over the next 10 years.

“It is past time for America to begin paying down our $30 trillion national debt and get serious about the record inflation that is crushing the wages of American workers,” Manchin said in his statement. He said the proposed legislation “would dedicate hundreds of billions of dollars to deficit reduction by adopting a tax policy that protects small businesses and working-class Americans while ensuring that large corporations and the ultra-wealthy pay their fair share in taxes.”

Resident Joe Biden said in a statement that the proposed legislation “will reduce the deficit beyond the record setting $1.7 trillion in deficit reduction we have already achieved this year, which will help fight inflation as well.”

Read More

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“And we will pay for all of this by requiring big corporations to pay their fair share of taxes, with no tax increases at all for families making under $400,000 a year,” he said. “This is the action the American people have been waiting for.”

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) criticized the measure on Twitter.

“Democrats have already crushed American families with historic inflation. Now they want to pile on giant tax hikes that will hammer workers and kill many thousands of American jobs,” he wrote. “First they killed your family’s budget. Now they want to kill your job too.”

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

NILES, Ohio—Tim Ryan’s old street in east Ohio is a progressive oasis in a working-class town suffering from deindustrialization and the opioid crisis. Rather than the American flags seen on lawns just a few streets over, several of the 3,000-square-foot-plus homes on North Rhodes Avenue sport pride banners.

Carl Mymo, a retired forklift driver who lives just two blocks from where Ryan did, said those living on the conspicuously wealthier avenue in Niles don’t care about the same issues as the rest of the town, such as skyrocketing gas prices. “They can afford it,” Mymo said.

“This is all Democrat, this neighborhood,” said Mymo, a lifelong Democrat until this year when he changed his registration, as he pointed to larger homes in the distance. “I was a Democrat but started voting Republican on everything after Trump. I don’t like Ryan at all no more. I used to like him, but to me he’s just a regular politician now.”

Mymo’s description was familiar to others who spoke with the Washington Free Beacon in Niles, where Ryan lived until 2013. Several residents remarked on the town’s golden years when large corporations such as General Electric employed thousands of people in-town or nearby. Those golden years corresponded with overwhelming Democratic Party support, and are the reason Ryan’s seat was safe for decades.

That’s not the case anymore. Many of those companies are now gone, as are the jobs. One out of four jobs in Trumbull County, where Niles sits, disappeared from 2000 to 2016. And Ryan is gone as well. He moved just north to Howland after purchasing a 4,300-square-foot McMansion with his wife. A real estate listing from before the sale describes the home as “beauty on a private cul-de-sac” with a three-car garage and granite countertops in the kitchen. His new town’s median income is roughly 50 percent higher than Niles, according to U.S. Census data.

Ryan’s campaign did not respond to an interview request.

Ryan’s Senate campaign message for voters in Ohio is simple: He’ll bring factory jobs home from abroad. In a video announcing his candidacy for the Senate seat occupied by the retiring Republican senator Rob Portman, Ryan toured an abandoned factory in Niles.

“China is out-manufacturing us left and right and it’s time we fight back,” Ryan says in another ad. “We’ve got to go all in and it starts by investing in Ohio workers.”

But for many voters living in Niles, that line is getting stale. For 20 years Ryan has served in Congress passing no bills except a handful to rename federal buildings. Few of those factory jobs have come back.

“I don’t think he’s done a lot for the area,” said Sarah Smith, a nurse at a hospital in neighboring Warren. “I don’t think he’s ever had a regular job. When General Motors left, he says he did a lot to try and stop that, but it was too late. He gets on the bandwagon too late.”

That Ryan is jumping on the protectionist bandwagon is a criticism often lobbed by his Republican opponent, J.D. Vance. In June, Ryan wrote a letter to resident Joe Biden demanding he not remove tariffs against China. Almost four years earlier, however, he criticized Trump’s anti-free trade agenda “designed to inflict maximum damage on the U.S. economy, for minimum gain.”

Now Ryan says he always “agreed with Trump on trade.” His massive $9 million campaign war chest, the majority of which has come from out-of-state donors, has funded ad blitzes across Ohio. Almost every ad features references to China and none to the Democratic Party. (Smith said she found Ryan’s commercials the most annoying thing about his campaign. “China, China, China. Come on.”)

Ryan’s attempts to distance himself from the Democratic Party are most obvious when he revels in the occasional compliment from Fox News. Earlier this month, Ryan released an ad featuring years-old clips from Fox hosts noting his opposition to the far left on such issues as open borders.

Yet Ryan’s strategy of cherry-picking praise from conservatives comes with a tremendous caveat: His voting record. Ryan votes with Biden 100 percent of the time in Congress—exceeding his FiveThirtyEight-predicted voting record by more than 30 points.

Why Ryan behaves in Congress the way he does while pitching himself on the campaign trail as a flexible moderate is a bit of a mystery to the voters in Niles. If it were 1998, or even 2008, such a voting record wouldn’t be a surprise. Trumbull County went blue by 22 points in 2008, and again in 2012.

“Basically Niles voted Democrat no matter who ran. It used to be if you were a Republican, you couldn’t get elected around here no matter what,” said Dave Sherman, who works in IT for a nearby steel company and intends to vote for Vance. “I voted Democrat until my early 50s. My dad was a Democrat, he was a union guy. But I think a lot of people here who aren’t talking are going to vote for J.D., there’s just a loud minority for Ryan.”

Trump carried Trumbull County by more than 6 points in 2016 and more than 10 points in 2020. The county’s recent voting history makes it more red than Ohio as a whole, which favored Trump in 2016 and 2020 by around 8 points.

The effect of Trump on northeast Ohio can’t be overstated. Outside of cities, this Ohio region used to be one of the bluest in the country. Trump was the first Republican to win the neighboring Mahoning County since 1972.

Even Ryan’s supporters in Niles such as Carla Dean, a retired school teacher who knows the Ryans personally, say the area’s politics aren’t what they used to be. Speaking with the Free Beacon on her front lawn, Dean sighed and pointed at her neighbor’s home.

“He’s huge. Trump is huge. [My neighbor] flies the [Trump] flag,” she said. “I don’t even speak politics at all with him because I’m afraid.”

How Vance performs in November without Trump on the ticket will be a test for whether Republicans can hold their gains in the rustbelt. A major asset for Vance is that the only politician with a higher name ID in Niles than Ryan may be Biden. The voters unfamiliar with Vance know one thing: They’re unhappy with the president.

Ryan is acutely aware of this fact. When Biden came to Cleveland earlier this month, where some Trumbull County residents commute to for work, Ryan conveniently scheduled campaign stops in the state hundreds of miles away. A Morning Consult poll recently found Biden’s approval rating 23 points underwater in Ohio.

“I don’t know who I’m gonna be voting for,” said Michelle Yuri, a registered Democrat who works as a packer at the printing company Pubco, when asked about Vance. “I don’t agree with our president, let’s just say that.”

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

Declare Emergency hopes roadblocks will pressure Biden to declare a climate emergency

The climate alarmism group that blocked interstates around Washington, D.C., on Independence Day is planning to shut down city streets to pressure resident Joe Biden to declare a climate emergency.

Declare Emergency will organize roadblocks, including a conga line to disrupt traffic, and rallies at national monuments throughout the week of Oct. 1—all to put enough strain on the nation’s capital to push Biden to take executive action on climate change, group leader Donald Zepeda told the Washington Free Beacon. During the “week of arrest,” Declare Emergency aims for up to 100 protesters to be arrested for “nonviolent civil disobedience action.”

“What people are interested in and concerned about is that sacrifice element,” Zepeda said, “so I don’t think we’re going to have actions without arrests.”

Like Declare Emergency, which believes there are fewer than 1,000 days left to avert a climate catastrophe, left-wing activists in the United States and Europe are intensifying their protest strategies. Declare Emergency protesters on July 4 blocked all lanes of Interstate 495 in Montgomery County, Md., for more than an hour, leading to 14 arrests. Italian environmental activists on Friday glued themselves to Botticelli’s Primavera painting in Florence, the latest in a series of stunts involving artwork in European art museums.

The climate group Now or Never, meanwhile, is planning to stop the July 28 Congressional Baseball Game to pressure Democratic lawmakers to pass climate legislation. Seventeen congressional staffers on Monday staged a sit-in in Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D., N.Y.) office to demand he reopen negotiations on climate legislation, which has failed to garner support from Republicans and some Democratic lawmakers.

Biden last week announced several green energy initiatives, including new funding for cooling centers and offshore wind projects in the oil-rich Gulf of Mexico, but stopped short of declaring an emergency. Environmental activists are demanding an emergency declaration because it would allow the president to redirect military funding to green-energy construction and end fossil fuel exports, among other measures. Declare Emergency said anything short of these actions are “band-aid solutions” that will result in the deaths of “billions” of people.

“While a step in the right direction, resident Biden’s speech fell short of declaring a climate emergency,” group member Michelle Wehner said in a news release. “The efforts he named for adaptation and a clean energy transition are wholly inadequate to stopping the climate crisis. The result will be billions of people left behind.”

Since assuming office, Biden has taken several actions to reduce U.S. energy production, including bans on oil and natural gas leases on federal land. The president also revoked the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline, which would have transported hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil from Canada to the United States. Still, Declare Emergency believes Biden has failed to live up to his campaign promise of prioritizing climate change.

“The Democrats are all about this as the biggest issue of our lifetime, and then they do nothing,” said Paul Severance, a Declare Emergency mobilizer. “That’s soft denial. If we don’t all get in this, and get in this fully, we are not going to survive.”

Declare Emergency has organized several “action periods” in the nation’s capital since Biden’s inauguration, aiming for each protest to gain more attention than the last. Between July 1 and 6, the group blocked roads and rallied at the Lincoln Memorial and the White House. It is preparing for the October protests by mobilizing supporters through biweekly meetings, leaflet distribution, and telephone outreach, according to a meeting recording obtained by the Free Beacon. Zepeda expects the October demonstration to be “better” and “bigger” than July’s.

The Washington Monument and the American Petroleum Institute headquarters are under consideration for rallies in October, Zepeda said. Declare Emergency is willing to do “whatever is nonviolently necessary” to get Biden to “begin a full-scale World War II-like mobilization effort” and stop climate change, according to the group’s website.

“Change needs to come very quickly and we don’t have a lot of time,” Zepeda said. “We need to really front load a lot of the changes so that way, we save as many lives as we can.”

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

A group of liberal Capitol Hill staffers were arrested in the office of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) after demanding Democratic leadership resume talks on climate legislation.

More than a dozen employees of Democratic members of Congress sat down in Schumer’s office holding signs calling on the majority leader to renew efforts to combat climate change. The protest ended after about half an hour when Capitol Police bound the disgruntled staffers’ hands with zip ties and escorted them out.

One of the protesters, Saul Levin, a staffer for “Squad” member Rep. Cori Bush (D., Mo.), tweeted photos of the demonstration from within Schumer’s office.

“We, staffers of the US Congress, are peacefully sitting in on Senator Schumer’s office to demand Dems pass climate justice policy this year,” Levin tweeted. “We are putting our bodies on the line because we have no other choice.”

Congressional staffers have increasingly attempted to pressure lawmakers to pursue certain policies and deliver greater benefits for staff. Staffers across several progressive offices have begun efforts to unionize in pursuit of “pay equity” and other aims.

In a similar protest last week, Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) and Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.) pretended to be handcuffed and arrested as they were taken away from a protest at the Supreme Court.

Levin is the son of progressive congressman Andy Levin (D., Mich.), who is currently caught up in a primary contest with another incumbent. A focal point of the race concerns Levin’s failure to support the state of Israel, a key American ally.

Negotiations on a massive climate spending package broke down last week when Sen. Joe Manchin (D., W.Va.) rejected efforts to spend hundreds of billions on combating carbon emissions. Manchin cited record inflation and the importance of traditional energy sources in outlining his opposition to the “green” policies.

SOURCE: The Washington Free Beacon

BlackRock, JPMorgan Chase, others respond to boycott notices from West Virginia state treasurer

Six financial institutions that West Virginia Treasurer Riley Moore contacted over their alleged boycotting of the fossil fuel industry have replied, denying the accusations while laying the groundwork for what could be a protracted legal battle.

The Epoch Times obtained the letters through a West Virginia Freedom of Information Act request.

Moore sent letters to BlackRock, JPMorgan Chase, U.S. Bancorp, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley on June 10.

That was in line with a new West Virginia law that limits the state’s ability to do business with financial institutions believed to be boycotting energy companies with ties to coal, oil, or natural gas production.

The companies had to respond to the letters within 30 days of receiving them to avoid being placed on a list of restricted financial institutions, which would have been published 45 days after Moore’s office sent them. The West Virginia State Treasurer’s Office still intends to publish a list of restricted financial institutions.

Coal, natural gas, and oil are important sources of revenue for the state, including through what are known as severance taxes.

In fiscal year 2022, West Virginia collected almost $800 million in such taxes, more than the nearly $300 million collected during the previous fiscal year.

In addition to providing direct tax revenue, the fossil fuel industry is a significant driver of the state’s overall prosperity.

A West Virginia University research report found that coal power and coal mining were collectively responsible for roughly $13.9 billion in economic activity in West Virginia in 2019.

Sen. Joe Manchin

Unsurprisingly, one of the few national-level Democrats who defend fossil fuels is Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.).

On July 14, Manchin made it apparent that he wouldn’t back resident Joe Biden’s efforts to finance additional climate and energy programs.

The move prompted one University of California–Santa Barbara political science professor to write on Twitter that she was “holding [her] children and sobbing.”

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), and other Democrats have since taken aim at Manchin’s chairmanship of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.

Moore, a Republican, thinks Democratic rhetoric and policies targeting the fossil fuel industry have helped shift voters in West Virginia, a state long dominated by Democrats, toward the Republican Party.

“We have union members voting for us in large numbers now, which was not the case previously,” Moore told The Epoch Times on July 18.

‘Risk Management’

The banks and financial institutions that received letters have argued that their various policies on fossil fuel financing don’t qualify as boycotts, claiming that they’re covered by the ‘reasonable business purpose’ exemption in West Virginia’s new law.

“The Company’s reasonable business purpose for any determination not to proceed with a transaction includes assessment of both commercial viability and risk management for the Company and its clients,” Goldman Sachs’s letter reads.

It also noted that it tells firms in the energy sector that a diversification strategy tends to make companies “much more successful in obtaining financing.”

“That is the basis for the note in the Company’s Environmental Policy Framework, available on its public website, about the phasing out, over time, of financing of thermal coal mining companies that do not have a diversification strategy within a reasonable timeframe,” the letter reads.

Goldman Sachs’s letter also states that the company doesn’t back energy firms if their financing supports new thermal coal mines, mountaintop removal mining, new coal plants that lack carbon capture or equivalent technologies, and new upstream oil drilling in the Arctic.

Similarly, Wells Fargo asserted that its limitations on the financing of coal, its “additional levels of due diligence to companies in the oil and gas and mining industries,” and its unwillingness to fund oil drilling in the Arctic reflect a reasonable business purpose—namely, risk management.

Morgan Stanley explicitly argued that its risk management strategy encompasses “the risks of climate change” to “our reputation and client relations.”

In its own “Environmental and Social Policy Statement,” Morgan Stanley pledges to not finance new coal plants without carbon capture or similar technologies and to not finance new thermal coal mining.

“By 2030, we will phase out our remaining credit exposure to companies with greater than 20% of revenue from thermal coal mining globally,” the policy statement reads.

JPMorgan Chase made a very similar argument in its letter to the West Virginia State Treasurer’s Office.

Like Wells Fargo and other firms that responded to Moore’s letters, JPMorgan Chase stated that it already provides significant financing to the energy industry, countering the argument that they’re boycotting it.

Yet, the language in West Virginia’s law refers not merely to full de-banking, but more broadly to any action “intended to penalize, inflict economic harm on, or limit commercial relations with a company” involved in fossil fuels or doing business with a fossil fuel company.

This includes actions on a firm because it “does not commit or pledge to meet environmental standards beyond applicable federal and state law.”

Wells Fargo, for its part, pointed out that it recommended against a resolution at its 2022 shareholder meeting that would have seen it “adopt a boycott-like policy prohibiting lending to or underwriting new fossil fuel development.” That resolution failed to pass.

Law Professor Questions Responses

William J. Carney, Charles Howard Candler professor of law emeritus at Emory Law School, didn’t find the financial institutions’ arguments convincing.

In a July 15 email interview with The Epoch Times, Carney noted that some of the banks and financial institutions “claim ‘environmental risks,’ which involves either the risk of government regulations or a risk of reduced demand for their products.”

“Rising oil prices put the lie to the price risk, as does President [Joe] Biden’s trip to Saudi Arabia to beg for more output,” he said. “Government regulation is dependent on politics, which currently suggests a consumer revolt against anti-energy policies.”

Carney said he strongly disagrees with the overall push for de-banking oil, coal, and natural gas companies.

“Obviously it is suicide for local banks to boycott fossil fuel companies in West Virginia. The entire anti-carbon fuel movement is predicated on a false assumption: that global warming is caused by the use of fossil fuels,” he said. “[Boards] that act on this assumption have not engaged in a reasonable inquiry, and thus should not be protected by the Business Judgment Rule.”

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

Moderate Democrats will play a key role in the coming midterm election and very likely handle the U.S. House to the Republicans, analysts said.

The main reason for the rebelling moderates is President Joe Biden’s policies.

“This [moderate voting] base is becoming increasingly disenchanted with what seems to be the ongoing failures of the Biden administration on major party platforms such as rising inflation, gas prices, and a pretty weak economy,” Jamie Wright, a political pundit at The Wright Law Firm, told The Epoch Times.

Josh Wilson, a political consultant and ex-aide to former Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad, shared the view that the state of the economy under Biden is a significant factor in the shift.

Besides this, Wilson also pointed out that the historical pattern of midterm elections for the party of the president will also contribute.

“Simply based on U.S. electoral history, where the president’s political party tends to suffer major losses during the first midterm of the presidential term, it is highly likely that Republicans will see major gains in the House of Representatives,” he said.

Progressive Movement Pushing Moderates Away

For over a decade, progressive activists have been pushing the political spectrum in the United States to the left in various ways, from woke textbooks in the education system to protests on the streets.

As a result, some moderate Democrats found themself isolated and being pushed out.

Elon Musk, the Tesla CEO who was a liberal, shared a meme on April 28 explaining how the progressive movement has made him closer to the conservative side. The meme shows the political left moving away from the centers since 2008 while the center and right remaining stationary. As a result, he falls into the area close to the conservative without even changing his political stance.

The meme was liked by over 1.5 million users after Musk shared it on his Twitter account.

Biden, who mainly posed as a moderate during his campaign, followed the progressive movement closely after he came to the White House and adopted policies from the woke agenda.

That deepened the discontent among moderates.

A major factor was the extreme lockdowns, mask mandates, and vaccine mandates related to the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, also known as the novel coronavirus, outbreak.

“You just have one public official who’s never been elected … no scientific citation for any of these mandates, simply telling Americans: ‘do what you’re told,’” Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a prominent Democrat, criticized the policies during an interview with The Epoch Times’ sister media NTD at the “Defeat the Mandates” rally in Washington on Jan. 23.

The mandates were “all designed to instill fear and confusion in Americans, and it’s just a catastrophic exercise in bad government and manipulation,” he added.

Biden’s Energy Policies and Soaring Gas Price

Another area that moderate Democrats feel upset about is the economic performance during Biden’s presidency, especially the rising inflation and gas prices.

According to CNBC’s All-America Survey, Biden’s economic approval rating dropped 5 points from April’s survey to 30 percent. His approval of the overall handling of the presidency dropped to 36 percent. Of the 800 people across the nation polled by CNBC, 51 percent believe Biden’s efforts to fight inflation are making no difference, and 30 percent think the measures are actually hurting.

The Biden administration has strictly adhered to its climate crisis agenda, rejecting boosting domestic energy production and insisting people should buy electric vehicles as an alternative option amid high gas prices.

However, electric vehicles are unaffordable for many families.

A Consumer Reports survey shows that 52 percent of people say they would not buy an electric vehicle because the costs of buying and maintaining them are too high.

How Moderate Democrats May Act in Midterms

Though the moderates are not as popular in the mainstream media or on some politicians’ priority agendas, they still make up the majority of Democrats, Wright said.

“There is a real power struggle between the moderates and the extreme left within the party. However, moderates still make up the majority,” she said.

She believes it’s important for the Democrat candidates to appeal to the moderate voting base to ensure they don’t leave the party over failed policies.

Wilson believes the moderates will act in two ways—either they won’t show up or vote Republican—and will cost the Democrat Party heavily.

“Democrat members of the Congress seem to be trending more to the left but Democrat voters are not. To be more specific, Democrats in D.C. seem to be putting social issues ahead of economic issues. [However,] most voters want the government to focus on things that impact them daily,” he said.

“It’s more likely that moderate Democrat voters will not vote in the midterm if [they are] extremely fed up, rather than cast a ballot for a Republican,” he said. “If the Republican candidate in those swing districts is also a moderate, they may be able to bring Democrat voters across the line.”

“By not showing up and voting for the Democrat, Democrat voters will absolutely be protesting the current situation and indirectly helping Republicans take control,” he added.

The situation is also likely to put moderate Democrat candidates in harm’s way because “they will be painted as extreme liberals during the campaigns” under the current political climate, Wilson stated.

Masooma Haq and Jack Phillips contributed to the report.

SOURCE: The Epoch Times

If there is one consistent fact about electric vehicles, it’s that they are unreliable. Now their charging stations have come into question as well.

In Aspen and Glenwood Springs, Colorado, many companies have implemented charging stations in their parking lots. Not all of them are fully functional, however.

Chris Lane, a Basalt resident who owns two electric cars, highlighted a couple of issues with the local charging stations: Cables are ripped out, attachments are damaged and screens are cracked.

If there is a mechanical problem with any one of these stations, it automatically shuts down, Aspen Daily News reported.

“I charge in Glenwood, I see problems. I charge in Aspen, I see problems,” Lane said. He mentioned one exception: Tesla’s stations.

“I will say this, the Tesla stations are way better, flawless,” he said.

Companies and stores that have EV stations in their parking lots are expected to take care of them, but this has not always been the case.

The Willits Town Center in Basalt, Colorado, is a prime example. With 11 total stations, five were out of order and two were inaccessible, leaving only four functioning chargers available.

“I see mechanical failures up and down the valley,” Lane said.

Despite Tesla’s more consistent reliability, most charging stations in the area have been inoperable. This fact should be concerning for EV owners, especially if they are traveling long distances.

Furthermore, a gas-powered sedan was seen in one of the two parking spaces in front of an EV station on July 10. The second spot, as Aspen Daily News wrote, was a handicapped space, “creating confusion as to whether it could be used for charging for a driver who wasn’t handicapped.”

So even when the EV stations work, someone might park their gas car in front of it, preventing EV owners from charging. This is another indication that buying an electric car is inefficient and inconvenient in the long run.

Philip Jeffreys, SkiCo director of housing development, described the local charging station conditions as a sort of “Wild West.” SkiCo owns 12 charging stations, which roughly make up 26 percent of all spaces in the company’s private parking lot.

In addition to slow recharge times and long lines, this incident demonstrates yet another EV technology failure … and it’s not just in Colorado.

Tesla Owners Share Alarming Message Received on Screen Amid Heat Wave

In San Francisco alone, 23 percent of EV stations were not functional of the 657 plugs studied. The study excluded Tesla’s charging stations.

It sure seems like electric vehicles will not become the future of driving, based on this ongoing trend.

Despite the left’s political efforts in advocating for widespread EV use, the future is not going green anytime soon.