Diane Lewis, the chair of the Utah Democratic Party, was quick to hail the enactment of the Inflation Reduction Act. President Joe Biden signed the controversial spending measure into law on Tuesday afternoon.
WASHINGTON, D.C. – President Joe Biden finally signed a sweeping tax, health care and climate change bill into law on Tuesday afternoon.
“With this law, the American people won and the special interests lost,” Biden said.
“This is a historic moment,” he added. “Democrats sided with the American people and every single Republic in Congress sided with special interests in this vote. Every single one.”
Utah Democrats were quick to applaud that Capitol Hill victory.
“Republicans love to use the pain that families are feeling from inflation to score political points,” said Utah Democratic Party Chair Diane Lewis. “But when it came time to actually do something to lower costs, reduce the deficit and invest in American energy security, they all voted no.”
The entire Utah congressional delegation voted against the so-called Inflation Reduction Act, a $430 billion package intended to extend Obamacare, invest in green new deal schemes and levy new corporate taxes.
Even Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) voted no.
Biden ended up settling for the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), all he could get passed out of his multi-trillion dollar “Build Back Better” plan announced last year.
Democrats claim that the new law will reduce the deficit by more than $300 billion over a decade, including roughly $124 billion expected to come from a crackdown on income tax cheats by Internal Revenue Service agents. But the price tag for that increased enforcement is an $80 billion investment in the IRS.
Will the new law actually reduce inflation? Not likely, according to Republicans.
While Democrats hailed the IRA’s benefits, analysis by the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania suggested that the bill would have no impact on inflation until 2028, when the measure would reduce inflation by 0.1 percent. The Wharton economists called that “… statistically indistinguishable from zero.”
The Congressional Budget Office agreed that the IRA’s delayed affects would be “negligible at best.”
Even Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), the principal architect of this legislative compromise, admitted that the law’s investments in health care, climate change and the Internal Revenue Service won’t do anything to bring down inflation anytime soon.
But Utah Democrats were quick to parrot the Biden administration’s talking points for the upcoming midterm elections.
“In the last year and a half,” Lewis argued, “Democrats has passed bills to fight the pandemic, rebuild our roads and bridges, reduce gun violence, honor our promises to veterans, invest in American manufacturing and now to fight inflation and lower cost for working families.
“Republicans talk. Democrats get things done.”
Lewis said she was not surprised the Republicans’ unified stand against the IRA. While Democrats are fighting to cut costs and support families, Republicans have been proposing what she termed as a radical agenda of tax increases on working Americans and cuts to Social Security and Medicare.
“They are out of step with Utahns,” Lewis insisted. “That is why it is so important that we elect Democrats at every level this November.”