Joe Manchin has been touting new oil and gas projects as part of his half trillion tax and spend deal with Chuck Schumer.
But as the Wall Street Journal reminds us, Manchin is going to get double-crossed by the climate change fanatics who now run Washington, just as Manchin double-crossed taxpayers.
Manchin was supposedly promised new oil and gas leases on public lands and streamlined permitting for all drilling, mining projects, road building, and other infrastructure projects. But the Biden administration and Nancy Pelosi will use a 1970 environmental law called “NEPA” to blockade any new fossil fuel projects. As the WSJ puts it: "without NEPA revisions, good projects will keep getting stuck in unending delays and lawsuits."
2) Read Our Lips: People Making Less Than $400,000 Will Pay A Lot More Taxes
Families earning less than $400,000, according to Joe Biden were not going to pay even “a dime of new taxes” under his tax plan.
This was Joe Biden’s signature promise. It was the 2020 campaign’s equivalent to George H W Bush’s “read my lips, no new taxes” pledge back in 1988.
Anyone who believed Joe probably deserves to pay more taxes.
Anyway, here are the facts. Congress’s official budget and tax scorekeeper, the Joint Committee on Taxation, finds taxes rising in every income bracket. It’s a $7 billion a year whack at the lower and middle-class Americans.
On the table we just need the first two columns and lose the footnotes.
One provision of the bill would allow the EPA to add "greenhouse gases” to the list of pollutants to be regulated under the Clean Air Act.
This is simply a back door way for the Biden EPA to impose an expensive economy-wide emissions scheme under Clean Air Act Section 115 ("International Air Pollution.”). It would open a Pandoras Box of new EPA regulations targeted toward fossil fuel producers.
Does Joe Manchin REALLY believe this bill is good news for energy-producing states like West Virginia?
4) One Day Congress Subsidizes Microchip Producers – The Next It Whacks Them With New Taxes
We mentioned yesterday that manufacturers get killed under the new corporate tax in the Manchin-Schumer plan. One of those industry groups is the semiconductor manufacturers. Wait. The Chips Bill passed last month gives $50 billion to companies like Intel and Samsung and now this hits them with a new annual tax estimates to cost the industry nearly $2 billion a year. The left hand of the government gives, and the right hand takes away.
One goal of the half trillion dollar Manchin-Schumer bill is to outlaw all cars that are not EVs. (The bill is practically paying people to buy Teslas.). This has always been Al Gore’s dream – to declare war on the combustible engine.
But to what end? Our friend Mark Skousen, an economic professor at Chapman University and the sponsor of Freedomfest, is teaching a course on common sense economics. Here is what he tells us:
“Today our discussion was on environmentalism and global warming. I started off by asking the 50 students, ‘By a show of hands, how many of you think that pollution has gotten worse in Los Angeles since 1960?’ Most of the students come from Southern California and should know the answer.
But 70% raised their hand and said yes, pollution has gotten worse!
Then I showed them this chart:
As the chart shows, there's been a dramatic rise in the number of automobile use in Los Angeles since 1960, but air pollution has dropped by 90%!”
We would simply add that this chart is measuring reductions in REAL pollution like lead, carbon monoxide, and smog. CO2 and methane are NOT pollutants.
