Talk About Having Your Work Cut Out For You
Efficiency in the Imperial City? Elon and Vivek will start out as the two most unpopular guys in DC, and it’ll be all downhill from there. Will anyone even take them seriously? Well, there’s a twist to this story that could lead to some serious results. But first:
@realDonaldTrump
I am pleased to announce that the Great Elon Musk, working in conjunction with American Patriot Vivek Ramaswamy, will lead the Department of Government Efficiency ('DOGE")….
What will they do with the “IRA”? The very title, Inflation Reduction Act, is a cynical political joke, but the question is, could the stuff of this act end up hitting a fan operated by Elon and Vivek?
A Looming Political Earthquake
City Journal ^ | 4 Nov 2024 | Mark MillsIf it weren’t for the election season swamping news coverage, odds are more people would be talking about the revelation that, to quote a Bloomberg headline, “The World Bank Somehow Lost Track of at Least $24 Billion.” In fact, that may understate the reality: the World Bank’s “accounting gap” could be as big as $41 billion. The missing funds in question were for “climate finance” projects, “financed by taxpayer dollars from its member countries, the biggest being the US.”
According to the Oxfam report that was the source for the Bloomberg story, “There is no clear public record showing where this money went or how it was used, which makes any assessment of its impacts impossible.” It is possible that much, maybe even most, of the missing money went to the intended people and purposes. But only the hopelessly naïve would dismiss the probability of rampant waste, malfeasance, graft, and outright theft as explanations for that “gap.” Spending of such magnitude and velocity with sloppy oversight is an invitation to thieves.
But the oversight scandal at the World Bank is chump change compared with the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and its massive planned “climate finance” program. The misnamed IRA is, in the words of its advocates, the “largest climate policy in US history.” [emphasis added] The law’s ambitions dwarf those of the World Bank. By various estimates, the IRA will lead to some $3 trillion in direct spending on grants, subsidies, and the like, plus another $3 trillion in related spending induced by mandates and rules. For perspective, that’s far more than the cost of Obamacare, and even more than the $4 trillion the U.S. spent (inflation adjusted) to fight World War II.
(Excerpt) Read more at city-journal.org ...
Chicago alderman Paddy Bauler famously said, “Chicago ain’t ready for reform yet.” That was on the occasion of the election of Richard J. “Boss” Daley in 1955. He was right, of course, and nothing has changed. Same goes for the Imperial City on the Potomac. But there could be an exception when it comes to the IRA. If I were in the shoes of Elon or Vivek my idea would be to ignore most of the institutional graft and corruption to focus on the IRA, which should offer a wealth of targets. The reason this strategy could work is because they just might get the backing of the party that controls all the levers of power and has a lot to gain:
A Looming Political Earthquake
The Inflation Reduction Act’s unprecedented climate spending—much of it uninvestigated—may soon lead to unprecedented scandals.
Democrats have been eager to extol the IRA’s virtues. (The law was passed without a single Republican vote, only the second time something so consequential was so partisan. The other was Obamacare, which, it bears noting, didn’t create a “whole of government” lallapaloosa of multibillion-dollar grant-giving programs.) Given the stated claims and goals of the IRA, and the quantity of money already ladled out, one would expect to have seen far more news and press releases touting program successes. The IRA is, after all, the most expensive effort ever made to restructure an entire U.S. sector.
In the absence of further information, we can make a few reasonable suppositions: if the IRA is subject to typical levels of waste, abuse, and fraud for government largesse, then odds are that a major political tectonic shift is on the horizon. Perhaps more than any other single factor, the undoing of the climate-industrial complex could come from the volume of money being pushed into the economy to accelerate an impossible goal: the “energy transition.”
The popular expression “follow the money” comes from the iconic 1976 movie, All the President’s Men, which dramatized the Watergate investigation and the subsequent political earthquake. IRA spending dwarfs anything that precedes it. If serious investigative journalists do follow the money, it’s a good bet that we’ll see gargantuan scandals emerge.
Worth watching. I would never underestimate Elon’s gumption and ability to get a result. This could be just the thing the doctor ordered for the GOP. They won’t have to clean up their own act, just act sanctimonious while the Dems get dragged through the mire of their own making.
Department of Government Efficiency, kind of an oxymoron. Normally I'd want to know, Where is Jim Hacker when we need him to be Efficiency Supremo, but Elon is more of a serious person.
The Inflation Reduction Act was so partisanly lopsided because it was passed as tax reconciliation (between the house and senate) that could not be filibustered. It can be undone the same way, so it is a fat, juicy, early target.