The Democrats’ “Inflation Reduction Act” – which according to the Congressional Budget Office will raise taxes on the middle class to the tune of $20 billion – not to mention unleash an army of IRS agents on working class Americans over the next decade, was made possible by Bill Gates and (in smaller part) Larry Summers, who have been known to hang out together.
In a Tuesday Bloomberg article that reads more like a newsletter for the Gates fan club, the billionaire Microsoft co-founder recalls how earlier this year, as moderate Democratic Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema continued to block the tax-and-spend legislation over concerns that it would raise taxes on the middle class (it will), Gates says he tapped into a relationship with Manchin that he’d been cultivating since at least 2019.
Gates was banking on more than just his trademark optimism about addressing climate change and other seemingly intractable problems that have been his focus since stepping down as Microsoft’s chief executive two decades ago. As he revealed to Bloomberg Green, he has quietly lobbied Manchin and other senators, starting before President Joe Biden had won the White House, in anticipation of a rare moment in which heavy federal spending might be secured for the clean-energy transition.
Those discussions gave him reason to believe the senator from West Virginia would come through for the climate — and he was willing to continue pressing the case himself until the very end. “The last month people felt like, OK, we tried, we’re done, it failed,” Gates said. “I believed it was a unique opportunity.” So he tapped into a relationship with Manchin that he’d cultivated for at least three years. “We were able to talk even at a time when he felt people weren’t listening.” -Bloomberg
Federal tax evasion is a felony, and felons cannot legally own firearms, nor can they vote in at least a dozen states. Biden’s standing army of tax collectors can therefore, in theory, kill three or four “deplorable birds” with one stone, so to speak. One wonders: What would Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, and James Madison think of this? And what would they do about it?
The Biden administration’s “Inflation Reduction Act” will increase inflation with hundreds of billions in additional government spending and money creation by the Fed while making supply chain problems even worse with onerous new corporate taxes, especially on energy, and myriad new “Green New Deal” environmental regulations. Increased government spending and reduced production will cause higher prices, not lower.
To collect all the new taxes for this latest election-year spending binge the administration is proposing to spend some $80 billion to more than double the number of IRS agents, hiring 87,000 new ones, 70,000 of which are reported to bearmed. The Democrat party wants a standing army of armed tax collectors to enforce its will.
Americans once fought a revolution over such acts of tyranny. Among the abuses by King George III listed by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence were that he “sent hither Swarms of Officers [i.e., armed tax collectors/enforcers] to harass our people, and eat out their substance” and “He has kept among us, in Times of Peace, standing armies . . .” That is how King George III collected the notorious stamp tax. He sent armed soldiers into the homes of the colonists to demand that they prove they had paid the stamp taxes on all of their documents, a stamp being essentially the receipt for taxes paid. And that was just for the stamp tax. They also confiscated firearms and deprived the colonists of civil liberties. It is little wonder that the founding fathers adamantly opposed a standing army in peacetime, only allowing for two years of funding for the army in the original Constitution. “A standing army is one of the greatest mischiefs that can possibly happen,” declared James Madison. It is “the bane of liberty,” said Elbridge Gerry. History proves that standing armies have caused “havoc, desolation, and destruction” wrote George Mason.
Jefferson’s nemesis, Alexander Hamilton, may have been a war hero but after the war, as America’s first treasury secretary, he tried to resurrect an American version of King George’s standing army of tax collectors. In the early 1790s Western Pennsylvania farmers protested the first federal tax on a commodity, a distilled spirits tax known as the whiskey tax. The farmers distilled much of their grain into alcohol and even used whiskey as a medium of exchange. They felt discriminated against since there was no similar tax on tobacco, rice, etc. and so they refused to collect and pay the tax, even tarring and feathering federal tax collectors when they showed up.
Since the whiskey tax was his idea, Hamilton talked President George Washington into getting the governors of Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania to provide some 13,000 conscripts to ride into Western Pennsylvania to enforce the whiskey tax. A large standing army of tax collectors, in other words, larger than the army that defeated the British at Yorktown. George Washington himself led the army of tax collectors into Western Pennsylvania but the protesters had all but vanished when they got there. About twenty of the leaders of the tax rebellion — some of whom were elderly Revolutionary War veterans — were rounded up and “run through the snow in chains,” wrote William Hogeland in The Whiskey Rebellion. Washington apparently got bored by the whole affair and went home, leaving Hamilton in charge.
Hamilton ordered local judges to render guilty verdicts against all the men who were eventually imprisoned and, if Hamilton had his way, would have been hanged. Only two out of twenty were convicted, however, and President Washington pardoned them both, putting an end to America’s first British-style imposition of a standing army of armed tax collectors.
The bill also spends 80 billion dollars on the IRS. Supposedly this will help collect more revenue from “rich tax cheats.” While supporters of increasing the IRS’s ability to harass taxpayers claim their target is the rich, these new powers will actually be used against middle-class taxpayers and small businesses that cannot afford legions of tax accountants and attorneys and thus are likely to simply pay the agency whatever it demands.
The Affordable Care Act, No Child Left Behind, and the USA PATRIOT Act received new competition for the title of Most Inappropriately Named Bill when Senate Democrats unveiled the Inflation Reduction Act. This bill will not only increase inflation, it will also increase government spending and taxes.
Inflation is the act of money creation by the Federal Reserve. High prices are one adverse effect of inflation, along with bubbles and the bursting of bubbles. One reason the Federal Reserve increases the money supply is to keep interest rates low, thus enabling the federal government to run large deficits without incurring unmanageable interest payments.
The so-called Inflation Reduction Act increases government spending. For example, the bill authorizes spending hundreds of billions of dollars on energy and fighting climate change. Much of this is subsidies for renewable energy — in other words green corporate welfare. Government programs subsidizing certain industries take resources out of the hands of investors and entrepreneurs, who allocate resources in accordance with the wants and needs of consumers, and give the resources to the government, where resources are allocated according to the agendas of politicians and bureaucrats. When government takes resources out of the market, it also disrupts the price system through which entrepreneurs, investors, workers, and consumers discover the true value of goods and services. Thus, “green energy” programs will lead to increased cronyism and waste.
The bill also extends the “temporary” increase in Obamacare subsidies passed as part of covid relief. This will further increase health care prices. Increasing prices is a strange way to eliminate price inflation. The only way to decrease health care costs without diminishing health care quality is by putting patients back in charge of the health care dollar.
The bill’s authors claim the legislation fights inflation by reducing the deficit via tax increases on the rich and a new 15 percent minimum corporate tax. Tax increases won’t reduce the deficit if, as is going to be the case, Congress continues increasing spending. Increasing taxes on “the rich” and corporations also reduces investments, slowing the economy and thus increasing demand for government programs. This leads to increasing government spending and debt. While there is never a good time to raise taxes, the absolute worst time for tax increases is when, as is the case today, the economy is both suffering from price inflation and, despite the gaslighting coming from the Biden administration and its apologists, is in a recession.
The bill also spends 80 billion dollars on the IRS. Supposedly this will help collect more revenue from “rich tax cheats.” While supporters of increasing the IRS’s ability to harass taxpayers claim their target is the rich, these new powers will actually be used against middle-class taxpayers and small businesses that cannot afford legions of tax accountants and attorneys and thus are likely to simply pay the agency whatever it demands.
Increasing spending and taxes will increase the pressure on the Federal Reserve to keep interest rates low, thus increasing inflation. If Congress was serious about ending inflation, it would cut spending — starting with overseas militarism and corporate welfare. A Congress that took inflation seriously would also take the first step toward restoring a free-market monetary system by passing Audit the Fed and legalizing competition in currency.
If you ever want to peer into the future, look at the names of the bills passed by Congress, and then assume the opposite results for their intended goals. The “Inflation Reduction Act” will be yet another example. You can expect much more inflation if such an act is ever implemented.
For a thousand years governments around the world have proven fiat money creates inflation.
Now the US congress wants to battle rampant inflation by printing yet another $billion.
MCViewPoint 