Batya Ungar-Sargon and Robby Soave dive deeper into the specific provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act that the Senate passed last night.
So we wanted to dig a little bit deeper into the inflation reduction act so-called that passed the senate last night uh washington post reporter jeff stein highlighted some standouts from the bill that includes money for clean energy like 80 billion dollars for electric vehicles heat pumps home solar installation as well as a 15 tax on corporations with more than
One billion dollars in profits and medicare prescription drug negotiation however not all democrats were on board senator bernie sanders criticized the bill and said it would not do enough to combat inflation the former presidential candidate is now calling for an extension of the child tax credit which was left out of the final legislation and lower price lower
Prices on insulin also fail to make it into the final text a big win obviously for the pharma lobbyists which after comes after republicans blocked the measure from passing you can see here just how much the us pays for insulin my god in comparison to other countries you can also see here chile comes second but it’s not even close to the u.s price and we can
Come back to that in a minute i think it’s a shame that the uh the prescription drug negotiation got left out i take uh you know i take bernie’s criticisms of it on that front in particular i also my my kind of big takeaway with the bill is look you can say that these policies are important they’re necessary on their own because whatever we have to fight climate
Change so we have to encourage green energy you can say that you can say you know we want to we should have the child tax credit because families need it i just don’t understand how you can say that all of these things together are going to reduce inflation because more government spending is to my mind one of the sure ways to to exacerbate inflation that seems
To me to be what most economists think about the issue that runaway government spending is not i don’t think it’s the only cause of inflation in this case but that it it does cause inflation so so it’s one of i think this bill is in the long uh kind of proud tradition of congressional uh acts that are called something that do not correspond at all to what they’ll
Accomplish um you know patriot act type stuff but that’s not to say that maybe the individual provisions can stand on their own they just don’t look very likely to reduce inflation to my mind and i don’t think that’s a crazy thing to say but what’s your take away on it bacha i definitely think it’s gonna have very very little impact on inflation because inflation
Is a right now problem and this is very long term it’s going to take a long time for us to see the impact of this bill on the economy you know years and hopefully please god by then inflation will have been resolved um naturally or in some other way so i i totally agree with you about the branding you know democrats wanted to be able to go campaign and say we
Passed the inflation reduction bill right and hope that nobody was paying attention to what was in it which you know obviously belies the contempt that they have for their voters you know as if they don’t know better um but you know aside from the question of that branding that was you know just typical democratic gaslighting um you know what what is your take
On what’s in the bill how do you feel about what made it in do you can you support these things robbie i mean no but i’m i’m sure well like i said i do support the the medicare um prescription drug negotiation absolutely that seems like something that it doesn’t seem like a a conflict from my standpoint in terms of like libertarian views it that it’s obviously
A complicated policy question but i yes absolutely the government should be able to negotiate to lower those prices i mean if we’re especially if the government’s going to subsidize all of them why wouldn’t we want those prices to be lower it doesn’t it’s it’s just it’s kind of it’s just a giveaway in terms of how it’s structured now to big pharma and yes and i
Take the left’s point and it’s not just the left’s point a lot of libertarians make this point too the kind of opportunity for corporatism for cronyism for you know these companies the powerful companies and the drug companies being some of the most powerful lobbying uh uh influence peddlers that there are can uh you know structure the us government to uh to
Subsidize their products or require their products to do all sorts of things i i think the left usually approaches these issues by saying and that’s why we need to you know fight lobbying or they deserve tax these corporations more or make them contribute more whereas my solution tends to be and that’s why we need to uh give the government less power to kind
Of that is given that the government is the tool by which these corporations kind of inflict their will on everyone so let’s let’s weaken the tool and and then and and that is my way of going about it and on the other stuff look the i don’t know the climate stuff seems uh seems both very croniest in some ways like you know subsidies for all these kinds of green
Companies which are very you know very cutting edge environmental technologies i don’t know how much the people are demanding obviously the people are not demanding them enough because we wouldn’t need to subsidize them if people were lining up to put solar panels on their houses now probably what we could do is get rid of all the terrible regulations that make it
More difficult for things for people to do things like put solar panels on your houses every time i hear from someone who tried to do this it turns out there’s a and now these are often regulations at the local level which can be just as annoying as as large federal regulations but they find out that yeah there’s some reason why you have to get permission from
The you know the town council whoever the authority is to do it and it’s very it’s very irritating i certainly don’t think the government should make it harder for people who care about the environment and want to you know spend their own money and invest in environmental strategies that said subsidizing these things to this extent is i think a a lot trickier which
I and i get that climate change is an important thing that we need to combat but uh i don’t know i have mixed feelings about it too at the very least mixed feelings and where are you on the 15 minimum corporate tax do you believe that corporations should be paying zero in taxes where do you fall you’re really you’re really trying to you’re trying to twist the knife
Here you’re trying to uh expose my like zero tax agenda uh i don’t know that that 15 might be a reasonable uh tax rate for these corporations um yes i want everyone including corporations everyone to pay as little taxes as possible unleash the productive powers of the market to make our lives better they pass these taxes along to everyone else but honestly the the
Bigger taxes are not are probably not the main issue for a lot of these companies it’s the rate what are the punitive regulations that make life harder for them to do business for them to hire make it harder for them to hire more people or open new factories or you know do all of those things those are the things the proactive measures by the government that we need
To that we need to get out of the way so they can so they can create more value for the economy obviously they do have to yes pay some amount of taxes we do need to fund you know a i will fund a government that is in my ideal world much more minimal than the one we have currently but you do have to fund some kind of government and now so much of what the government
Does i would not have us do and that’s probably something that you know you and many of our our left-leaning viewers would agree with that on some fronts we want less funding for you know bombs missiles or guns going to ukraine or wherever else we have inflicted our kind of military footprint uh we want less money for all that stuff less you know less money for
The police to harass property owners now there’s a there’s a place for police certainly but you know for the for the swat team to break down your grandmother’s door in the middle of the night because you know they have the wrong door it’s a wrong door raid or some you know trivial non-violent non-threatening drug charge something like that that stuff happens all
The time i want less funding for those kinds of government projects and and i suspect many of our viewers do as well and probably probably you as well but we do have to have a government of a certain size sure i guess glad to have uh ripped that concession from you robbie yeah thanks thanks a lot for that bocce but but so what’s your impression overall of uh you
Know the provisions of the bill do you think this is going to help out the working class and this is you know this is really good for them or are a lot of struggling people going to say yeah more more money for you know green energy subsidies what does that do for me it’s complicated i mean i was really disappointed that you know when president trump promised he
Was gonna you know if you know force these companies to allow medicare to negotiate lower prices that that that never happened on his watch so i’m i’m very happy see i totally agree with you i think that’s definitely going to help a lot of working-class people obviously i mean we’ve talked about this a lot but i think that the climate stuff is the exact opposite
You know it’s you know who has who who is in the market for solar panels for their roof a person who owns their own home which as we talk about you know ad nauseam is something that is really out of reach for many the vast majority of americans today especially working class and middle class americans right you know 12 000 rebate on an electric vehicle who’s that
Gonna help well somebody who has 60 000 sitting in their bank account to spend on a tesla right like it’s so it’s you know a lot and then the the the sort of corporate welfare of of it all you know giving um tax breaks to corporations um for going green i mean to me that’s just you know with if you could have a much bigger impact on the environment by just banning
Uh private jets but they would never in a million years do that because the democrats base is like the private jet set right like they love flying around in their private jets like the number one number two you know flyers of of private jets there was a report last week like taylor swift oprah winfrey and steven spielberg right these are not republicans right so you
Know so i to me it’s sort of like this climate stuff often ends up being a form of class warfare where you know rich people get to feel get high on their own you know supply basically um making zero sacrifices and then enforcing these sort of attacks on the working class so i’m not sort of like a lot less excited about that but i’m very excited about the provision
Um to allow medicare to negotiate drug prices i’m excited about the money that’s going to go to the irs hopefully to sort of get people at the top now people at the bottom as we discussed earlier today and um so i feel that this was a real achievement on behalf of the democrats and the other thing i’ll say is you know so bernie came in very upset you know saying
This is going to do nothing right in classic bernie fashion and then the rest of the democrats sort of shut down all of his amendments um you know people were saying people were criticizing both sides of that right they were shutting down all of his proposed amendments you know for things that i think are really important like adding you know dental care and and
Vision care to medicare and things like this they were shutting them down because they were worried that any disturbance of the balance here would cost them a vote which they needed every vote to pass this you know people were getting upset at both sides but to me like that that this is this is what successful politicking looks like bernie shows up and says we
Didn’t go far enough which is true and everybody else says yes it’s true we’ll get there you know somewhere else let’s move this along incrementally so i thought that was like it was you know i was glad to see that like something is working in our government right something is getting passed and i think a lot of this stuff is very popular with the american people
Corporations making over a billion dollars in profits like asking them to pay 15 percent of corporate tax you know i think most americans are on board with that most americans are definitely on board with negotiating drug prices it has huge amounts of popularity exactly so you know it’s a good day i think well that’s uh that’s a great opinion i’m not sure about
Inflation reduction but we will see and we’ll have more rising right after this
Transcribed from video
Climate Bill: INSULIN Cap STRUCK DOWN, $80B For EVs, MISSES Inflation Reduction? Batya & Robby By The Hill