Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, D-N.Y., stands silently during a press conference on the Inflation Reduction Act at Glynwood Boat House in Cold Spring, Recent York, Aug. 17, 2022.
Michael M. Santiago | Getty Images
WASHINGTON — The Treasury Department on Wednesday announced that billions of dollars slated for investments in clean energy, electric vehicles and batteries under the Inflation Reduction Act will go to relatively underserved communities throughout the country.
The announcement comes because the IRA, the Biden administration’s landmark law targeting manufacturing, infrastructure and climate change, turns one yr old. The greater than $500 billion in announced investments, $200 billion of which is within the clean energy sector, is a key goal of the laws, in accordance with the Treasury.
A senior Treasury official told reporters on Wednesday that the agency can also be seeing meaningful private investment within the efforts. The symptoms rebut old notions that personal investment suffers when large public initiatives go into effect, the official said.
A Treasury report released Wednesday attributed the projected outcomes to “modern supply-side economics,” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s term to explain policies that prioritize economic growth together with climate change or inequality.
Concrete data on the true effectiveness of IRA investments is not going to be available for several years, but available public figures show that firms plan to make the most of bonuses within the law to speculate in disadvantaged communities, in accordance with the report.
The report cites data on the Biden-Harris administration’s Invest.Gov website that shows that just about 90% of the announced clean technology investments are in counties with below average weekly wages.
Over 80%, are also in counties with lower than average college graduation rates, 65% are in counties with above average overall poverty rates and an equal percentage are in counties where a lower than normal share of the population is employed, in accordance with the report.
The Treasury Department also found that the CHIPS and Science Act, a second arm of President Joe Biden’s economic agenda that may bolster semiconductor manufacturing within the U.S., is “a vital contributor” to the constructing of producing facilities. Construction greater than doubled since 2021 by June of this yr, especially within the technology sector, in accordance with the report.
Though early reporting suggests the Biden administration policies could support long-term economic growth, some Republican lawmakers panned the IRA’s touted advantages on its first anniversary.
Rep. Jason Smith, R-Mo., chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee and an open critic of the laws, said the IRA is a “massive transfer of tax dollars” from the working class to the rich, big banks and huge corporations. He also contended it will profit the Chinese Communist Party, because the U.S. relies on Chinese imports of key inputs for clean energy technology.
“The Biden Administration is using the IRA to weaken our trade rules, kill American jobs and spend billions to maintain America depending on China for critical minerals,” Smith said in an announcement released Wednesday.
