It’s been two miserable years since the Biden-Harris Inflation Reduction Act. And it’s worse than you think

Politicians love spending other people’s money, and this glaring truth has never been more evident than today, on the two-year anniversary of the Inflation Control Act (IRA).

It was sold to the American public as a way to ease the soaring inflation caused by the Biden-Harris administration’s previous surge in federal spending, but the administration has once again played the role of both arsonist and firefighter.

We were falsely led to believe that spending more money we don’t have on federal programs we don’t need would tame inflation.

How does it work? It doesn’t. According to the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, IRAs have no statistically significant effect on inflation and may actually make it worse.

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Leaving aside the question of how big IRA spending has affected inflation, IRAs contain a number of egregious provisions. The measure’s tax increases on large and small corporations have hurt U.S. competitiveness, slowed economic growth, and reduced American jobs, and are now at their highest rates since October 2021. Overall, despite the President’s promise not to raise taxes on Americans making less than $400,000 a year, by 2031 these taxpayers will be footing two-thirds of the IRA tax increase.

Then there are the billions wasted by the IRA in undeserved subsidies to special interests. Whose bright idea was it to extend Obamacare’s wealthy subsidies, unnecessarily giving billions of taxpayer dollars directly to big health insurance companies? Or to give hundreds of billions of dollars in useless tax breaks to green energy companies?

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The problem isn’t just that these new subsidies are three times more expensive than originally projected — that the IRA has provided $1.5 billion for absurd spending schemes like “tree equity” and that, according to some reports, 70% of the tax subsidies will go to China’s renewable mining and manufacturing industries — but that these green energy giveaways are imposing huge costs on Americans who are already struggling to pay the bills.

To make matters worse, this entirely partisan bill, pitched as an inflation-busting measure, would pump $80 billion into an expansion of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), including the hiring of 87,000 new enforcement agents, which would result in increased audits of low and middle-income households.

Shortly after Joe Biden took office as president in 2021, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projected that the federal government would spend $5.3 trillion in fiscal year 2024. After more than three years of unchecked spending by the Biden-Harris Administration, that figure has ballooned to more than $6.8 trillion, an increase of 29.4%, or roughly $216,000 per second.

In fact, the deficit has more than doubled, interest payments on the debt have tripled, and the debt is higher than it was during World War II. The Biden-Harris Administration is literally spending faster than the speed of light (186,282 miles per second). As Will Rogers once quipped, “It’s a good thing we don’t get all the government we pay for.”

Meanwhile, the CBO projects that federal revenues this year will be $538 billion higher than projected three years ago. The federal budget would be roughly balanced if the Biden-Harris administration hadn’t led Democrats in Congress and increased spending. But the federal government has increased spending by $3 for every dollar of increased revenue, and as a result, the budget deficit this year is likely to be $1 trillion, or 100% larger than projected when Biden first took office.

To make matters worse, the Biden-Harris Administration’s policies have increased the cumulative federal budget deficit by $11.6 trillion over the past decade.

Even by Washington standards, $11.6 trillion is a staggering amount of money. What happened?

Legislation enacted during the Biden presidency has increased the deficit by $4.8 trillion. Executive actions taken by the president unilaterally, i.e. without Congressional approval, have added another $2 trillion. Even more infuriating, spending-induced interest rate increases have increased projected net interest costs by $4.8 trillion over 10 years.

Given the fact that the Democrats’ failed economic experiment has led to persistent inflation, growing budget deficits, and a possible recession, you’d think they’d come up with a different strategy. But no! Believe it or not, the Biden-Harris budget for FY25 calls for $4.9 trillion in new taxes and $1.7 trillion in new spending. So, obviously, these tax increases and spending increases are in addition to the budget deficit under current law.

Apparently the $84.9 Trillion the Federal Government plans to spend over the next decade is not enough for the Biden-Harris Administration. In fact, they don’t think they can get by on anything less than $86.6 Trillion!

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Next week, Democrats will gather in Chicago to formally nominate their party’s standard-bearer in the November election and ask American voters to support the same old things they’ve always done: spend, tax, borrow and expand government. Thankfully, there is another option, and if Republicans regain control of the White House and the Senate, the Budget Committee would lead the House Republican Conference to reverse the Biden-Harris tax and spending spree and restore fiscal sanity to Washington.

Politicians love to spend other people’s money, and the Biden-Harris administration has never seen money it didn’t want to spend. On the disastrous second anniversary of the Anti-Inflation Act, we are reminded of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s warning: The problem is that “eventually other people’s money runs out.”

To read more articles by Jody Arrington click here