One of the common complaints about the way our government malfunctions is one that I find myself completely disagreeing with. It’s the old lament that the two parties in Congress won’t cooperate “to get things done.” I’ve felt for a long time that this is one area where the adage reliably applies that the worst thing is to get what you’ve always wanted.
When the two parties come together and “get things done,” the results of the effort generally make me wish they’d go back to yelling at each other and refusing to cooperate. Because when they do finally manage to get things done, the things they do are massive gifts to special interests, usually set up in ways to obfuscate who the gifts are actually for. That’s because anything that is too obvious can attract attention that creates opposition to it. If you oppose things you can’t see, you just wind up looking like a crank who probably worries about water fluoridation and the Tripartite Commission, among other popular past conspiracy theories. If you look like a political crackpot, you’re easily dismissed and ignored.
Having thus cleared my throat and announced myself as a crackpot, what I had in mind about the absurd interest-group handouts hidden in congressional output was some of the destructive parts of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). The act itself was deceptively named, of course, as is the long-standing practice of giving bills obfuscating names. It can’t be too long now until Congress passes “The Sexiest Statute You’ve Ever Seen Act” into law, which will contain lots of new unfunded spending on well-connected interest groups. Par for the course, in other words.
Part of the IRA, which generally does nothing to reduce inflation, requires the overall economy to increase the consumption of Chinese manufacturing output. It does this because the administrative state already uses its power to block economic activity that the well connected want blocked, such as just about any effort to extract natural resources domestically. The administrative agencies arbitrarily cancel mining permits acquired legally by mining companies, knowing that the effort to get the cancelations rescinded will take years and add untold expenses, making the effort too costly. And so another industry with the potential for generating wealth and income at home is driven off shore.
The administrative state makes sure that extracting fossil fuels like coal, petroleum, and natural gas is too onerous for anyone to want to invest in. It also disapproves of mining for and refining copper, aluminum, lithium, and all sorts of rare earth metals, so it cancels mining permits for those arbitrarily, too. On the other hand, the IRA does all it can to make Americans buy stuff that uses more of all those materials. Americans would be buying those materials anyway, because we need electricity and machinery anyway. It’s just that the equipment to make the devices compliant with “renewable resource” standards requires a whole lot more of them up front.
One person who has reported consistently—and rather cheerfully—on this absurd government behavior is Mark Mills, who writes,
The U.S. Inflation Reduction Act will spend some $2 trillion to try and reduce CO2 emissions by about 1 gigaton a year (assuming fully deployed, and various elastic assumptions are true). A lot of that spending will end up directly and indirectly purchasing China’s products. Meanwhile, just the additional coal plants being built in China will lead to an additional 2 gigatons of CO2 emitted per year. Seems like a bad trade.
In sum, the law won’t allow us to produce the raw materials that it strongly encourages us to buy. It therefore requires us to look elsewhere for those raw materials. And the biggest supplier for those resources is the People’s Republic of China.
In order to achieve the goal of reducing CO2 emissions in America, we’ve enacted laws that will increase the CO2 emissions from China by an even larger extent.
That’s the sort of thing that happens when Congress “gets things done.” The things that get done always seem to be perversions of the original intent.
Okay, drumroll please! The character with the most movie credits (38, by the way), is..... GODZILLA!
Groundhog Day update: Ohios own official state groundhog, Buckeye Chuck, did not see his shadow this morning, according to cleveland.com. Spring is coming early!