The High Cost of Climate Scams in Biden's Inflation Reduction Act
Download MP3Is the Heartland Daily Podcast. The other day, Donald Kendall, director of the Glenn C. Haskins Emerging Issues Center at the Heartland Institute, was a guest on The Sean Thompson Show on AM560 The Answer in Chicago. Donald is a regular guest on Sean's show and was invited on this time to talk about a new Heartland Institute paper titled The High Cost of Green Scams Assess ing the Green Giveaways in the Inflation Reduction Act. Donald details how the whole thing was a scheme designed to enrich the politically connected and had nothing to do with fighting climate change, let alone reducing inflation.
Narrator:Have a listen. And this is the Shawn Thompson show.
Shawn Thompson:Illinois celebrates J. V. Pritzker's money laundering fraud. East Alton, Illinois. 5 Hundred Million Dollar EV battery lithium nonsense.
Shawn Thompson:I wonder, is it as flammable or less flammable as the EV battery facility in California that I think is still smoldering? Nobody knows because they squashed the information. Then then there's in Missouri.
Shawn Thompson:From beer to bullets and bombs for war to big V eight Corvettes. For generations, Saint Louis built America. That momentum has since faded. Many jobs were shipped overseas or companies sold out.
Shawn Thompson:But tonight, Saint Louis is reclaiming part of its past contributing for the future, and it all revolves around this property drone force flying over in South City, which will soon be a first of its kind for America. St. Louis's automotive industry once rivaled Detroit's. Now the nearly half billion dollar development at that South City site will feel the future auto industry. Good evening.
Shawn Thompson:I'm Corey Stark.
Shawn Thompson:And I'm Samantha Jones. And tonight news for us, Nathan Vickers is live from that site near the River Pere And I 55 detailing the one of a kind lithium battery plant that is now a go. Nathan.
Shawn Thompson:Five hundred million in Saint Louis was a go under the green new scam. Barack or or I mean of Joe Biden started by Barack Obama, of course, all a fraud. How many trillions of dollars are down that rabbit hole of futility and stupidity where nobody wants the EVs?
Shawn Thompson:I terminated the ridiculous and incredibly wasteful green new deal. I call it the green new scam. Withdrew from the one-sided Paris climate accord.
Shawn Thompson:The good news is now we can maybe reverse the trajectory. My next guest has spent a lot of time on this. And when it comes to the high cost of the climate scams, do we even have an eye an understanding of how long and how much money the American people have been robbed? I think it can go back way before Joe Biden. I think it can go back to the early years of W Bush.
Shawn Thompson:We'll discuss that and more with my next guest, Donald Kendall, who is the director of Heartland Socialism Research Channel. Donald, how are you?
Donald Kendal:I am doing wonderful today. How are you good, sir?
Shawn Thompson:I'm I'm I'm great, and I'm optimistic, and I think it's fantastic. But I have to tell you, as we discuss this right now, Illinois and JB Pritzker celebrates another $500,000,000 for another EV battery fraud, scandal, and scam in a place called East Alton. And there's no stopping it where Democrats are, the good news is I think the federal government will at least stop wasting the entire country's money on this, won't they?
Donald Kendal:Yeah. I think so. You know, what was that, what was that quote Nancy Pelosi, I think it was, where she said that we don't know what's in a bill until we pass it or something along those lines.
Shawn Thompson:Yeah. And then she tells people who go over to her house, whatever you do, don't smell a hammer. Don't sniff it if you find one laying around.
Donald Kendal:Right. Right. I'm sure I'm mingling it, just as much as she will.
Shawn Thompson:To pass it to find out what's in it. That stupid idiot that she is. Did you see her yesterday? My god.
Donald Kendal:If she
Shawn Thompson:was if she was a cocker spaniel, she'd never come home from the vet. That's for sure.
Shawn Thompson:Whoo. Right. Yeah. But, I think that
Donald Kendal:we have to amend that quote. I think that we don't even know what's in these bills even long after they're passed. You have to wait for some analysis by a group like the Heartland Institute to really understand what's in these bills. So we just released, I think yesterday, a new policy study, the high cost of climate scams, which, by the way, I had a part in naming that, that policy study, and I had you in mind when I when suggested that title there. So
Shawn Thompson:Thank you very much. Because this is how you know, you have to speak truth. None of it is none of it is based on reality. It's all based on a fraud. And that is how these these these concoctions are made.
Shawn Thompson:How can we build money with absolutely zero oversight and a virtue shield that prevents people from questioning us no matter how much money we lose. And that's what it is. It's a scam. So at least we can call it a scam.
Donald Kendal:Oh, yeah. Absolutely. I mean, slush fund scam, whatever you wanna call it. Once you get into this paper, it's so painfully obvious, the truth of the matter. And I mean, like, how long of a period of time was it when they were calling the inflation reduction act, the inflation reduction act, because they were claiming that it was gonna reduce inflation?
Donald Kendal:Because they didn't last very long. Because I know that he started, Biden started talking about it like this this big green energy, plan and all of that well into the election season. So it wasn't a a long period of time when they were trying to pretend that it was about reducing inflation. That the doors of that are just blown wide open. When you look at this paper and it talks about how, you know, Joe Biden, when he was going around talking about how this was trying to promote green energy and all of that, he was throwing around numbers like 300,000,000,000, 3 hundred and 50 billion.
Donald Kendal:But this shows because a lot of the incentives or you know, whatever it is, green manufacturing, electric vehicle subsidies, what have you, they were uncapped, uncapped federal incentives, which means that you could spend a whole bunch more money than you were expecting to, from the original plan. So some of these, these cost estimates were upwards of $1,800,000,000,000. 1 point 8 trillion dollars attributed to this IRA plan. It's absolutely insane.
Shawn Thompson:You know, to give you a perspective, the, after the after the collapse, the financial crisis, if I'm not mistaken, I believe what was passed was about was it was it 690,000,000,000, or was it 800,000,000,000? And that was to save the economy in 02/2008. So the idea that these and this is fraud. This is a financial crime. Can give without disclosure the fact that they allocated $2,000,000,000,000, nearly $2,000,000,000,000, of the people's money for for policies and for really innovations that do not exist or the failed innovations.
Shawn Thompson:This is the other thing I think we need to focus on. Nobody wants them because they suck. The batteries suck. The cars suck. Unless you're living in a place that is very moderate in temperature, they suck.
Shawn Thompson:When it gets too cold, you can't drive it. When it gets too warm, you can't drive it. I don't know why it wasn't on every national news, but I pay a lot of attention to California news. During the fires that were set by the homeless and the insane and the drug addicts, during those fires that are referred to as wildfires and afterwards, they had an entire crew go around and put on the back of cars in big red paint, EV or no EV. Because if it's an EV, you don't wanna go near that son of a dog because it can combust at any time because of the damage when the damage is done to the container of the lithium.
Shawn Thompson:And the idea that we would still pretend that these batteries are technologically safe or advanced, they're not. They're making it up, aren't they?
Donald Kendal:Yeah. No. Absolutely. And I there there are certain aspects of this when you're reading the analysis of all of this that really makes it clear that this isn't about trying to just like jumpstart the green economy or trying to get a foothold for electric vehicles so that they could become a self sustaining industry or something like that. It will be beyond that.
Donald Kendal:There's a breakdown of, the 02/2008 energy improvement and extension act. So that was back in Barack Obama years where it was, I think it was one of the first, EV subsidy programs out there and it was limited to like the first two hundred and fifty thousand customers or something along those lines. But then they had a built in phase out of that over the next year and a half because I think the thinking was that, yeah, we'll have a eighteen months of subsidies and then by then, the EV market will get on its own feet and we won't have to have government spending on that. That's completely not a part of this IRA. Like I said, completely uncapped.
Donald Kendal:Any vehicle bought would you'd be able to get a subsidy for it, any EV, vehicle, basically to the end of time under this new, under the IRA. It's absolutely unbelievable. And it's in it it's again, once you start looking at it, it's clearly just a slush fund to give to those that are politically connected.
Shawn Thompson:Of course.
Donald Kendal:I mean, we've talked about Solyndra. There's a half dozen that are mentioned by name in this report that are just politically connected. That's not even talking a lobbying firm set up by Stacey Abrams They're getting billions of dollars and stuff like that. But then there's also, one one of the largest recipients of the IRA subsidies is a Chinese owned company. It's in fact, it's the largest
Shawn Thompson:Is it Goshen?
Donald Kendal:Largest solar manufacturer got more than a billion dollars under this.
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Donald Kendal:It's just a giveaway program.
Shawn Thompson:Well, because this. Here's the thing, Donald. You and I remember this from the late eighties when the dailies, those simps, those morons in Chicago would parade around the Chinese communist to the mercantile exchange and show them the floor and then take them and give them sweetheart deals. It's a kickback scheme. We give money.
Shawn Thompson:The Chinese pretend to to buy our stuff, and they kick it back to the fracking democrats. This is out in the public eye, and they pretend no one can see it. And when you see what's going on in Goshen in Illinois and you see this deal in in in Saint Louis, Missouri, 4 Hundred Million Dollar battery plant. At the end of the news story, and it'll result in a 50 jobs. Yeah.
Shawn Thompson:Well, does anybody wanna take the time to divide 400,000,000 by a 50, and you realize that's 2,600,000.0 a job, you fracking morons. And the idiots vote for it because they think it's gonna help things rather than realize it's all a fraud. It's all a fraud. And that's what you know, this is the part that people have to get get used to. You either want the truth and real economy, economic growth, or you want the Joe Biden, Chicago Democrat illusion of business where it's all subsidized and it's all kickbacked.
Shawn Thompson:Yeah. What what is the, what's one of
Donald Kendal:the slogans of your show where it's like the Democrats are never right or the
Shawn Thompson:Yeah. The Democrats are never right, and the Republicans are seldom right.
Donald Kendal:Yes. That's right. Yeah. Because, you know, every aspect of this this conversation, I I feel like I could just respond to you with, it's actually worse than you're saying. Because there's a there's a part in this, where it goes to the policy recommendations.
Donald Kendal:And obviously, the best policy recommendation is just a full out repeal of this. Like, we've we've got the Republicans holding all the chambers, whatever. Let's just repeal it. But it talks about how that's actually a pretty sticky situation because some of this money is going to districts with, you know, a person, you know, in the house of representatives that has a bar in front of their name. Yeah.
Donald Kendal:And you know what? They've already got that money promised to their district, and they don't wanna see it go away. So there's there's there's Republicans that are gonna be fighting for that.
Shawn Thompson:Only the only the economic illiterate or the dirty. You know, this is the other thing. This is why politicians who never made money in their life never entered an actual business. They should never be politicians because they all become worth multimillion dollars, and nobody understands why. The reason is they're bribed.
Shawn Thompson:It's bribery. It's open fracking bribery. They're steering the contracts and they're bribed. Now if they have an r behind their name, that doesn't make any difference to me. I have zero respect for Republicans or men that do not understand the difference between honest economic growth and why this country is the youngest and the richest versus a Ponzi scheme of fraud.
Shawn Thompson:And this is our real problem. It's a it's a mentality. It's a character issue. There are people that say, well, it all spends the same. That was an expression I heard from my neighborhood.
Shawn Thompson:What the hell do you care? It all spends the same. No. It doesn't. And these are the guys where they they they someone else buys their sandwich, and they say, nothing tastes as good as a free sandwich.
Shawn Thompson:Well, you're a scumbag. You're you're you're a scumbag because I think nothing tastes as good as a sandwich that I buy with my fracking money. And this is something that we can't come to terms with. And the way that they make you pretend that this is normal, well, you have to come to the middle. You have to compromise.
Shawn Thompson:Well, really? Compromise with what? The fact that Joe Biden added $9,000,000,000,000 in four years. It's it it it is double any other moron that's ever been president. Or the fact that out of that 9,000,000,000,000 that we count, I say it could be 15 because it looks like all of the jobs numbers, and I mean all of them, were government hires.
Shawn Thompson:So now how do you unwind that knot of bull dung, which is a a corrupt economy? And that's what Illinois does. They steal the fracking COVID money. They steal the welfare money. They use more illegal aliens or any moron that they could put on a on a piece of paper, and they say, look.
Shawn Thompson:We spend it on him. And the reality is it's all a financial crime. So I think at this point, you gotta just separate. You you idiots go your own way. We'll call it the the USSA, and we'll have The USA.
Donald Kendal:Yeah. The USAB or something like that. Yeah. The
Shawn Thompson:United Soviet States Of America. I say we just go in and all the rest. You don't wanna complicate it too much. At least, 80% of these morons can't read.
Shawn Thompson:Yeah. What was that
Donald Kendal:one story about, the amount of money that was spent billions of dollars spent on building new charging stations for electric vehicles? And after a couple of years, only, like, 12 had been made or something like that. Some,
Shawn Thompson:like, ridiculous.
Donald Kendal:Was it seven? She has look. I'm giving them more credit than they're due.
Shawn Thompson:But Here's the thing, Donald.
Donald Kendal:I think that you could actually make the case that this IRA, the the inflation reduction act, bought more golden parachutes than charging stations. Because there's a part in this, paper that outlines the dozens of renewable energy companies, even after getting massive subsidies granted to them under this IRA program, have gone out of business.
Shawn Thompson:They're all bankrupt. They're all bankrupt. And the ones that exist exist on financial crime like Rivian. Rivian is a financial it's a financial crime. It's a scandal.
Shawn Thompson:$6,000,000,000 practically interest free. I don't even think it is. I think it is interest free from the federal government. More incentives from the state government. The whole fracking company sucks.
Shawn Thompson:Every time they sell a vehicle, you lose a hundred grand. Please, it's a joke. When you see that car, that's like somebody who's rich driving around in a big welfare vehicle. It's all fraud. I can't even stand to look at the fracking things.
Shawn Thompson:And they wouldn't exist if it wasn't for political corruption. This is the part you have to understand. Because honest business, guys who build gas stations, guys who start cars, unless they're honest, they go out of business. They can't get started. And when you talk about those EV stations, a billion dollars is a thousand million.
Shawn Thompson:1 thousand million. You could call up any any gas station company that's in existence, any oil company. You could open a gas station on a zero ground level for about $350 to $400. Open it up, and it starts making money from day one. Actual profit.
Shawn Thompson:So when that guy pays his employees, that's private sector money. That EV will never ever make a dollar. That's my whole argument against windmills and all the rest of it. It doesn't make a dollar. It's all a financial crime on the citizens of this country.
Shawn Thompson:And if it wasn't there, the national debt might be infinitesimal. We may not even have one if you eliminated the lie versus the truth.
Donald Kendal:Yeah. There's a saying that the difference between a billion dollars and a million dollars is basically a billion dollars. And you look at this paper, there's there's just a graphic that shows all of the billion dollars that are going to this subsidy and billions of dollars going to that subsidy. It's just like, you know, at that level, with this level of spending, it it's just you can't even comprehend it. And I think that that's, like, the trouble that we get in with this.
Donald Kendal:You hear these numbers. Like, some of the numbers that, were attached to the USAID thing that we talked about the last time I was on. Where people are like, oh, that's that's, you know, in the grand scheme of things, that's a pretty insignificant amount of money. It's like, you're talking about $55,000,000,000. Like, that's not insignificant.
Shawn Thompson:So so here here's the here's the difference, Donald. It's it's it's it's it reminds me of what Joe Kennedy said. Joe Kennedy, when they asked him, why were you out of the stock market? He said when the guy who shines my shoes for a quarter is talking about investing a thousand dollars, there's too many morons in the market. Did you ever hear that story?
Donald Kendal:I have not, but I should look it up.
Shawn Thompson:Joe Kennedy didn't lose a dollar. There's only a handful of guys, Arthur Cotton, Jesse Livermore. These are legends in stock markets trading. Okay? So they asked Joe Kennedy, well, how did you know?
Shawn Thompson:He had not been involved. He had liquidated his investments, like, three months or two and a half months before, whatever it was. They said, how did you know to get out of the market? He said, was getting my shoes shined. My my shoes shined by a guy who was charging me a quarter.
Shawn Thompson:He was talking to me about how I should he should invest at that time a thousand dollars, which would be the equivalent of a hundred thousand today. And he said, when this guy talks about money like it doesn't matter and he's putting because back then, you could have you could trade on margin. You could walk in with 10%, and and they used to call them bucket houses. They were all around. And the guys would give you 90% of the money.
Shawn Thompson:It was like the first financial scandal of lending borrowing money to people who didn't deserve it. So he knew when a guy who makes 25ยข working is talking about spending a thousand dollars, if this guy loses money, the whole game's over. Basically knew to get the hell out of the market as somebody who navigated the troubled waters of insider trading. He's the definition of insider trading. And he didn't even think it was safe enough to steal the money through inside information.
Shawn Thompson:And it's a fascinating reality when you hear people. And this is my biggest gripe when I talk about politicians. Here are the guys worked since 1977. Never made up more than $200 a year. He's got 9,000,000.
Shawn Thompson:It's a financial impossibility. Because when you go to work, right, you and me, when we invest in our money, we're investing after tax money. We make our money honestly. You gotta compound. You gotta pay taxes on it.
Shawn Thompson:It's virtually impossible without getting into an Amazon or to a a Tesla in the very beginning to really make millions of dollars and afford to have it as an asset after you pay taxes. But only honest men know that. So when you have people who have never accumulated a savings account of, say, $50, which is a lot of money. When you make your money honestly, 50 grand's a ton of money. Right?
Shawn Thompson:So when you when you meet these democrat morons and they talk about policies where, hey. We're gonna open this park, and the government's gonna invest in my neighborhood, and they're gonna put 7,000,000. Now anybody who's ever done any kind of business in landscaping knows you could put their park together for a hundred grand. But the idiots who don't know the difference between a hundred grand or 7,000,000 because to them, it's just all unachievable. It's just all numbers.
Shawn Thompson:These are the idiots driving us into bankruptcy because they support the scallywag that builds the park for a hundred thousand and steals 6,000,000 to his friends. This is why we're in this pickle. Because Oh, sure. And at end day money.
Donald Kendal:Right. And at the end of the day, that politician could say, I spent 7 millions making parks better.
Shawn Thompson:Exactly.
Shawn Thompson:Despite the fact that they could have
Donald Kendal:done the same job for a hundred thousand like you're saying.
Shawn Thompson:And the reason that they it exists is they'll get 70 companies to kick back 30%, and that's how Al Green is worth $9,000,000. It's a freaking kickback scheme. That's what it is. And for the first time in in in American history since George Washington, and I know they're making fun of him, this is the first time somebody holds the position in of the presidency who was not cultivated in the culture of corruption, which is our politics. Because this is how they teach guys who even work for the government.
Shawn Thompson:Listen. Just go sit in that fracking cemetery. Don't you get caught not working. Stay out of mind, out of sight. Wait for the end of the day.
Shawn Thompson:Drive the truck in, but keep it in the back of wherever you go. That's the real way it works. They teach them how to cultivate, how to get away robbing the people with a veneer of value. That's our problem, and it's a cancer. And I don't know if you can rip it out.
Shawn Thompson:I think it's time to start over.
Donald Kendal:Yeah. No. There's a lot of work to be done. I don't wanna be just a bearer of bad news. I think that, Donald Trump and his cabinet are doing a lot of things, especially in the energy and climate arena.
Donald Kendal:They're gonna have some sizable impacts. One of them is getting rid of the, endangerment finding, which is underpinning the entire crusade against, c o two. It's the whole That's right. That the c o two scam climate scam is built on. So if things like that can get done under this administration, it would have massive and lasting effect.
Shawn Thompson:So corrupt as a nation. We let politicians make what we exhale a fundamental principle of photosynthesis, a building block of life itself. We allowed these crooked rats in Washington to deem it a pollutant so they could tax it. Get the hell out of here. Time to rip that out by the roots.
Donald Kendal:Exactly right. Exactly right.
Shawn Thompson:Alright, brother. I love having you on. You can find him. He's he's the director of Heartland Socialism Research Center. Are and you're still doing the Heartland's Daily podcast, right, in stopping socialism TV?
Donald Kendal:Yeah. Sporadically. We we have the the big thing that anyone that's interested in this topic should go to heartland.org. You'll see the paper right on the front page. And then we also have the weekly climate realism show, which is at noon on Fridays, noon central time on Fridays.
Donald Kendal:Livestream on Twitter and Facebook, YouTube. You'll Rumble. You'll find it pretty much anywhere.
Shawn Thompson:Donald Kendall, thanks for time for me. I appreciate you and all the people at Heartland. Thank you.
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