“Asian Americans have not always voted blue. In 1992, when The New York Times first added “Asian American” as a racial category in its exit polls, 55 percent of Asian Americans voted for former President George H. W. Bush, a Republican, while 31 percent cast their ballots for then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, a Democrat. In the 1996 presidential election, Democrats narrowed the margin, with 48 percent going for Republican Sen. Bob Dole and 43 for Clinton, and by 2000 Asian Americans had drifted into the blue: Fifty-four percent voted for former Vice President Al Gore and 41 percent for then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush.”
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“Asian Americans seem to be shifting red. According to a 2016 survey from Asian and Pacific Islander American Vote, 19 percent of Asian Americans held at least a somewhat favorable view of Donald Trump. When the survey was conducted again in 2020, Trump’s favorability among Asian Americans had risen to 35 percent.”
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“the many different ethnic groups within Asian America have many different views. For example, a plurality of Vietnamese American voters (45 percent) supported Republican congressional candidates in 2020, according to that year’s Asian and Pacific Islander American Vote survey. Vietnamese Americans, a powerful force in Steel’s California district, have been a loyally red voter bloc dating back to former President Ronald Reagan, whose anti-communism policy stances resonated with the Vietnamese diaspora by nodding to homeland geopolitics.”
“every Republican candidate that Democrats spent money on beat a more moderate Republican in the primary and then lost to a Democrat in the general election.”
“While Colorado was once considered a solid swing state, Polis’ continued success as governor, as well as the state’s other electoral outcomes, have entrenched the state’s Democratic leanings. However, Polis’ popularity shows that Democrats can receive solid victories without relying on the increasing technocratic impulses of the party as a whole. While other Democrats—and increasingly Republicans as well—turn to government to solve problems, Polis has found success by wanting to reduce government power.”
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“While other Democratic governors were enacting strict COVID-19 regulations, Polis lifted mask mandates. While other Democrats scoffed at school choice, Polis, the founded of two charter schools, praised polices that increase educational choice. While other Democrats called for wealth taxes, Polis called on an end to Colorado’s income tax.
“I respect freedom,” Polis told Reason in July 2022. “It’s great because you’re free to be the way you want. That’s the way it should be.”
While the Democratic party—not to mention American politics as a whole—is trending towards embracing government control, Jared Polis offers a rare story of a politician that wants to reduce state power. His success offers evidence that an alternative approach, one where Democrats embrace rather than attack personal liberty, can be a wildly successful strategy.”
“The US is currently projected to hit its existing debt ceiling sometime in 2023, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center. While raising the ceiling should be relatively straightforward, it’s become a contentious process — and an opportunity for the minority party to extract policy concessions or score political points. Both parties have used debt ceiling increases to their advantage, but Republicans have done so much more frequently in recent years.
In 2011, for example, Republicans balked on suspending the debt limit and refused to move forward until President Barack Obama agreed to key spending cuts, concessions they ultimately secured. The US got so close to default that year, however, that Standard and Poor’s downgraded the country’s credit rating.
Political experts note that this disagreement marked one of the first times it seemed like lawmakers were actually willing to go over the edge, despite the economic chaos that could ensue. Were the US to actually default, that would likely downgrade the dollar and lead to a recession.
While a default has never happened, Republicans’ behavior in 2011 — and their current rhetoric — suggests that they’re more open to the possibility and taking such fights to that point.
Democrats, including in the White House, are reportedly considering preempting this worst-case scenario by tackling the debt ceiling this winter, according to Axios. The White House has denied that such conversations are happening.
There are also still questions about what a debt ceiling bill could look like. While some lawmakers including Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), and a group of prominent House Democrats, have expressed support for doing away with the debt ceiling altogether, others, like Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), have opposed taking this route. That’s likely because such talks still offer an opportunity to evaluate spending, and because it could be a useful tool for Democrats should the GOP hold the White House and Congress.
In lieu of getting rid of the debt limit altogether, there’s been growing pressure on Democrats to consider increasing it to such a high value that there isn’t likely to be a standoff over the issue in the short term.”
“The bill also puts restrictions on which EVs can qualify. Starting in 2024, an EV that qualifies for the full rebate amount must source at least 40 percent of its battery’s components—including minerals such as lithium, cobalt, manganese, and graphite—from either the U.S. or a country with which the U.S. has a trade agreement. Also starting in 2024, no minerals can be sourced from a “foreign entity of concern,” such as China.
The stipulation was part of a compromise with Sen. Joe Manchin (D–W.Va.), whose support was critical to the bill’s passage. Manchin insisted that the bill take a hard line on China, telling reporters: “I don’t believe that we should be building a transportation mode on the backs of foreign supply chains. I’m not going to do it.”
But 60–80 percent of EV batteries’ mineral ingredients are controlled by China. That country currently produces 76 percent of the world’s lithium-ion batteries, while the U.S. produces only 8 percent. Despite ambitious plans to scale up, the U.S. and Europe together will likely account for only about a quarter of total global production of EV component minerals by 2030.”
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“Politico suggests that the government can simply get around these strictures by issuing waivers, much as it has done for steel tariffs. In practice, steel waivers incentivized cronyism, with Washington bureaucrats picking and choosing which companies received waivers and which did not. And if a law has problems, surely the best place to deal with that is in the text of the legislation itself, not an unstated hope that the administrative state will fix the issues when they arise.”
“Despite the bill’s name, independent analysts have found it will have virtually no impact on inflation. In reality, it is a pared-down version of what Biden originally pitched as the “Build Back Better” plan—it leaves aside much of the original bill’s spending, but it maintains a huge corporate tax increase, huge spending on green energy initiatives, and a plan to swell the ranks of IRS agents. What was originally a roughly $4 trillion proposal that would have relied heavily on borrowing ended up being something of a rarity in Washington: a bill that will raise more revenue than it spends.
And where will it get that revenue? Quite possibly from you. Households earning as little as $50,000 annually are more likely to see a tax increase than a tax break from the legislation.
In the final hours before the House vote, the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) completed a breakdown of how the bill’s corporate tax increases would affect households at various income levels. The JTC, a nonpartisan number-crunching agency within Congress, found that households earning between $50,000 and $75,000 are more likely to see a tax increase than a tax decrease next year.
Higher-earning households are more likely to see tax increases, but households earning more than $1 million next year are actually far more likely than lower-earning households to get a tax break.
That fits with what The Tax Foundation, a tax policy think tank, found when it analyzed the bill. The Inflation Reduction Act will “would also reduce average after-tax incomes for taxpayers across every income quintile over the long run,” the Tax Foundation reported on Wednesday. Those tax increases will reduce long-term economic output by about 0.2 percent and could eliminate 29,000 jobs, the group found.”
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” Tax increases on corporations get passed along from the board room table to the kitchen table in a variety of ways: lower pay for workers, higher prices for consumers, and smaller investment returns for shareholders.”
“After Manchin agreed with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on the party-line tax, health care and energy bill, the West Virginia Democrat found himself bargaining with fellow moderate Sen. Kyrsten Sinema. Both hard-nosed negotiators, the Arizona Democrat’s business-friendly tax-approach clashed sharply with Manchin’s more progressive positions on taxes.
Manchin sought to target the wealthy and ended up agreeing with Schumer to target the so-called carried interest loophole that allows some people to pay lower tax rates on investment income. He also signed off on a corporate minimum tax package that most Democrats believed Sinema supported.
Ultimately, Sinema took a scalpel to the corporate minimum tax and scuttled any changes to carried interest, which Manchin called particularly “painful.” Triangulating between them through all of it: Schumer, whose job was harmonizing the views of the very public Manchin with an often-silent Sinema.”
“Permitting is the process for getting federal approval for energy projects, including oil and gas pipelines, which often undergo extensive review for their environmental impact. It can be a long and expensive process, and while Republicans and Democrats agree that the experience could be improved, they differ on what those reforms should entail.
Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), a chair of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources committee who has deep ties to the coal industry, has long taken issue with the current permitting process, arguing that it’s too convoluted. This summer, he struck a deal with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer: In exchange for Manchin’s backing on the Inflation Reduction Act, Schumer guaranteed a vote on permitting reforms that would streamline approval of fossil fuel and renewable energy projects.”
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“In a letter sent to both Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi last week, House lawmakers argue Manchin’s reforms would make it easier to greenlight harmful oil and gas projects, and reduce constituents’ abilities to oppose such endeavors. Additionally, they claim that attaching the policies to a must-pass bill would force lawmakers to choose between “protecting … communities from further pollution or funding the government.””
“You don’t have to believe that the market produces perfect outcomes to understand that government can rarely outperform private enterprise. Political decisions aren’t driven by any market signals, profit motive, or consumer preferences. These decisions are inherently political, suffer from a serious knowledge problem and are mostly untied to any accountability regimes when they fail. Government often proves to be biased against large, successful companies that provide new technology that legislators often don’t understand well but consumers love. This is why government so often fails, and this policy is no exception.”