Democrats are celebrating the signing of the “Inflation Reduction Act” this week, even though the bill will not reduce inflation at all, and may exacerbate it.
They are happy because they were able to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on pet causes and special interest groups — spending they were too embarrassed, and crafty, to call by its real name.
The act’s main priority is spending on “green” energy subsidies, which Democrats say will slow climate change — though even that is probably untrue.
The act also raises taxes — in the midst of an economic contraction that none dare call a “recession.” Ostensibly, the tax hikes will only affect rich people and corporations.
Biden and his staff keep promising that, but they didn’t write that promise into law in a binding way. And when you take the IRS, which had a budget of $13.7 billion in 2021, and give it $80 billion — three times what its former commissioner recommended — plus tens of thousands of new agents, most people know they are at risk.
In the days before the bill passed Congress, the media stopped referring to the act’s title; they were embarrassed by the CBO’s estimate that the legislation would have no short-term effect on inflation. It also defied common sense to claim that borrowing and spending additional massive amounts of money would somehow lower prices.
But President Biden has now decided to own the term, albeit while admitting the act’s real purpose: “The Inflation Reduction Act will take the most aggressive action ever to confront the climate crisis and strengthen our energy security,” he tweeted this week, expecting people to believe it.
The Inflation Reduction Act is only the latest in a series of Democratic Party attempts to sell a far-left agenda to Americans while claiming they are doing otherwise. Since Obamacare, Democrats have repeatedly lied to the American people about their legislation, and have rushed it through Congress, knowing voters would reject it if the simple truth were stated up front.
Some say it is in the country’s best interests to lie.
Economist Jonathan Gruber, one of the architects of Obamacare, famously claimed the American people were too “stupid” to understand the need for the legislation.
Hence the noble lies Obama had to tell — that it would save households $2500 per year; that people could keep their doctors, and that the law would not fund abortions. To others, the idea was a “Trojan horse” — designed to fail and be replaced by a grander, Medicare-for-All plan.
In a similar vein, liberal pundit Sam Harris said this week that he supported the unofficial censorship of news stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop in 2020 because it was necessary to ensure Trump was not re-elected. Better to lie to the public — at the cost of press freedom and integrity — than to let people know about the Democratic nominee’s potential corruption and ties to foreign regimes. If the truth came out later, so be it — the important thing was to dump Trump, supposedly a greater danger.
Another who defended the censorship at the time was CNN’s Brian Stelter, who not only applauded the censorship but said it had not yet gone far enough. He claimed it was necessary for journalists to suppress anything that might be disinformation — after he and his network pumped every anti-Trump conspiracy theory that came to hand, from “Russia collusion” to the Fine People Hoax.
Stelter and his show, ironically named Reliable Sources, finally got the boot on Thursday: their job was done.
When Democrats called their massive climate spending the “Green New Deal,” following the example of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), they created a successful brand, but also triggered a backlash. So they slipped many of the same ideas into the Inflation Reduction Act, and they are now celebrating. Who knows: when inflation eventually falls, perhaps after a recession, Democrats will claim their legislation deserves the credit — not the Fed cleaning up the mess government created.
And so it is with every major Democratic policy priority. Abortion is cast as “reproductive health,” though it is the exact opposite of reproduction. “Gender-affirming care” is a euphemism for amputating breasts and genitalia — even of minors.
Perhaps Democrats drew the wrong lessons from the Iraq War, when President George W. Bush supposedly “lied” about weapons of mass destruction to justify the invasion. But the “lie” was largely a result of faulty intelligence, delivered at a time when the administration, still reeling from 9/11, believed it could not leave anything to chance. Not every mistake is a “lie.”
Democrats know they are lying; they believe it to be for the greater good, because the people ought not be trusted. They need a “nudge” from government, as Cass Sunstein says; they need stories like the Hunter Biden laptop to be censored, as Sam Harris said this week. The problem: this strategy has no limit — until the system fails and the truth can no longer be denied.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.