The following content is sponsored by Americans for Limited Government.
Conventional political wisdom teaches that when the economy is bad, the party in power pays for it. James Carville owes his wealth and fame to the phrase “It’s the economy, stupid.” While that ushered his team to victory 32 years ago, we’re living in very unconventional times. Will the Democrats pay this year for their disastrous economic policies?
They have given us skyrocketing oil prices, unaffordable housing, catastrophic food prices, and on and on. The Biden Administration’s unprecedented inflation is corroding the ability of middle-class Americans to get ahead, and poorer Americans’ ability to survive.
Amidst all of this, the Democrats insist they have the solution … to the problems they created. The signature domestic “achievement” of the Biden administration has been the so-called Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which has helped propagate the worst inflation in recent American history.
Left-wing lapdog media have spent the last three years covering Biden’s disastrous economic policies. At one point, the Biden sycophants at CNN literally wrote the headline, “Why inflation can actually be good for everyday Americans and bad for rich people,” while MSN insisted that, “‘Bidenomics’ is making America great forever!”
That kind of Ministry of Truth-level propaganda is intense, but the facts speak for themselves. Inflation is terrible for normal people, and inflation has been terrible under the Democrats’ current regime.
And in addition to destroying normal people’s ability to pay for oil, housing, and food, now Democrats have their sights set on medicine.
Snuck into the IRA are measures that allow the government to enact price controls on some prescription medicines for seniors under Medicare. Indeed, one provision allows the administration to designate ten Medicare drugs as targets for government-controlled price “negotiation.” If companies don’t accept the price controls, they are forced to pay a 95 percent excise tax – for everyone who buys it, not just through Medicare.
So, either we have government price controls or we have a tax that all but doubles the cost of some medicines.
Very much like how the Inflation Reduction Act has increased inflation, this effort to reduce the cost of prescription drugs will increase it. And it appears the Biden administration won’t just settle for doing this to drugs for seniors under Medicare.
In his State of the Union, Biden declared war on everybody’s prescription drugs. Without sharing any details – but a heartstring-pulling anecdote about a 13-year-old boy with diabetes – Biden declared, “Let’s cap the cost of insulin at $35 a month so everyone can afford it. Drug companies will still do very well. And while we’re at it let Medicare negotiate lower prices for prescription drugs, like the VA already does.”
So that’s a threat that will only get worse. The IRA statute mandates that the government impose this 95 percent tax on up to 60 medicines for seniors. This is all but extortion, as the government is demanding that drug manufacturers give their products to the government for free.
The only possible outcome to this government price fixing scheme rather than honest negotiations will be drug scarcity in the present and, more concerning, reduced R&D budgets for the future – so no more miracle drugs on the horizon. Democrats want everyone to think that they’re Robin Hood – robbing from the rich and giving to the poor – but really, they’re robbing from everyone, keeping for themselves or their insurance company cronies, and dispensing breadcrumbs to peasants … who should really be more grateful?
If you weren’t worried enough about this, the Internal Revenue Service is committed to ensuring they get this pound of flesh from each of us. With their new cadre of 87,000 door-kicking agents, expect them to collect this excise tax at your local pharmacy. However, in a concession to transparency, the IRS allows companies to levy the 95 percent tax as a separate line item on receipts. So, at least, we’ll all know who to blame.
Inflation has sabotaged normal people’s livelihoods, so much so that too many articles say “The American Dream is dead” for us to hyperlink; so we’ll just do the search results. Staples like energy, housing, groceries, and medicine are now increasingly out of reach for more and more people, and the November election can’t come soon enough for most of us. The people who’ve made our economy more expensive are stupid, but will they pay for it at the polls?
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