Not only has Joe Biden conceded that the “Inflation Reduction Act” (this week celebrating its one year anniversary) is misnamed, and is really just a green energy pork-barrel program, but it turns out that even as pork barrel it fails the most basic political test, which is that pork barrel spending should go to districts that your party controls. That’s the whole point of pork barrel redistributionism. But guess what?
One reason for this is actually quite simple: red-controlled districts are likely to have less local bureaucracy in the way of windmills and large solar farms (on top of being more rural to begin with). But it is stunning to see that the Biden Administration’s incompetence extends this far.
JOHN adds: Steve’s explanation is right. I live in Minnesota, a temporarily blue state with wind and solar energy mandates. I periodically drive to my home state of South Dakota, a beacon of red state success, where I still have family. It is remarkable how, as soon as you cross the border from wind-promoting Minnesota to energy-agnostic South Dakota, you see hundreds of wind turbines. All of which, I believe, send their meagre output of electricity to Minnesota.
The sudden profusion of wind turbines across the South Dakota border is not because that state is pro-wind, it is because South Dakota is pro-business. You can do anything easier and cheaper in South Dakota than you can do it in Minnesota–including, ironically, building wind turbines. So even the Democrats’ most craven political moves don’t necessarily turn out as they intended.
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