During a House Oversight Committee hearing before the congressional recess, Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA) discussed the increased debt caused by the Inflation Reduction Act.
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00:00Mr. Chair, I ask unanimous consent to introduce this article in Politico from just a couple
00:06days ago. Senate Republicans, colon, House GOP's energy tax credit cuts won't work where
00:12a number of Senate Republicans are quoted. Without objection. Without objection. Thank you. Thank you.
00:17Now recognize Mr. Perry. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. or Dr. McBride, just listening to some of my
00:25colleagues. I'm just going to give you a vignette here. Well, we'll start with this. How much
00:31did the CBO, if you know, score the IRA at regarding the subsidies that would be given to these
00:39so-called renewable energy sources? Do you recall? In total, $370 billion. $270 billion of that was
00:46from tax credits. Right. And do you remember what the outside organizations other than the CBO scored
00:53it at shortly thereafter? Closer to a trillion. There was a range of estimates. A lot of, they
00:58talked about the uncertainty, but- I think it was over a trillion, $1.2 trillion or something like
01:03that. So let's just say if the federal government decided to give tax credits for manufacturing dog
01:12crap, do you think that there would be an interest in companies to manufacture dog crap for the tax
01:18credits, especially if it equated to $1 trillion? Yes, sir. Well, of course they would, right? And we
01:25could all sit up here and say, manufacturing is growing. There are all these manufacturing jobs
01:31associated with this new bill and the tax credits and these subsidies to manufacture dog crap.
01:38Well, quite honestly, Mr. or Dr. McBride, I don't see what we've done here as very much different,
01:45because I think this is dog crappers. Well, this is garbage. It is distorting the market.
01:52It is destroying the energy grid. It is, well, this is my opinion. In your opinion, are these subsidies
01:59encouraging the construction, manufacturing, placement of inefficient, unreliable energy sources
02:09at the peril of reliable baseload energy sources? In general, I'm not an energy expert, but that's
02:18what I understand. In general, there's a problem here of the general problem is subsidies for particular
02:29technologies. Now, some of these credits do try to go to a more neutral approach, which is good,
02:36but the most neutral approach is going to be to remove the subsidies entirely and to allow the
02:44market to sort out what is the future. This is an area where there's a lot of uncertainty about the
02:50future. The technologies are evolving every day. The companies are coming online and are changing every
02:55day. Trying to get into that space and specify this or that technology, as these credits do,
03:01is a proven way to waste a lot of resources, actually. Mr. Lieberman, do you have a comment
03:11on my question? I think you hit on something, that so many of these subsidized alternative energy jobs
03:18are just pushing aside unsubsidized conventional energy jobs. One example that I recently learned
03:25about there were two refineries in California. They used to refine oil into gasoline and diesel fuel.
03:31They shut down and they were rebuilt making renewable diesel and sustainable aviation fuels. And that's
03:39happening across the country. Not surprising, renewable diesel and sustainable aviation fuels
03:44currently get tax credits of a dollar per gallon on up. And, you know, conventional gasoline and diesel
03:51gets nothing. Now, you could visit those two facilities and say, look at the new jobs, look at the new
03:57activity. But nothing really new. They used to make gasoline. Now they make these. Now they, and incidentally,
04:03the alternatives are more expensive even with the seven. Right. They're more expensive. They're less
04:07efficient. I mean, if you live in California, if you live in California in the 80s, you didn't think about
04:13brownouts or blackouts at all. But if you live in California today, where they do all this subsidization
04:19and have all this green energy or actually don't have it, it's a way of life. And it's going to come
04:23across the country. And it's because of these subsidies that are not only inefficient and
04:28ineffective, but they're also bankrupting the country. Right. I mean, these subsidies,
04:33my friends over here say on the other side of the aisle, say that one big, beautiful bill
04:38is going to, you know, increase the debt and the deficit. And I'm not necessarily in disagreement with
04:43them because, and that's why I have some concerns about voting for the bill, but they failed to
04:49recognize or acknowledge that they blew a huge hole in the budget with these tax credits and subsidies
04:57for nothing. We're actually charging consume their elect have electricity bills gone up or gone down
05:03on average since the enactment of the IRA. Mr. Lieberman. According to the U.S. Energy
05:08Information Administration, electric rates, electric bills have been going up
05:12faster than the rate of inflation since 2022. I wonder why that is that the Inflation Reduction
05:19Act is dog crap and it should be repealed entirely. I yield.