Crom’s Crommentary: Joe Manchin and the Democrats Fail to Keep Pace with Inflation

Live from Music Row, Monday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed the original all-star panelist Crom Carmichael to the studio for another edition of Crom’s Crommentary.

CROM CARMICHAEL:

It’s interesting, Michael, to listen to the Democrats, and especially Joe Manchin. Especially Joe Manchin’s claim that they have not raised taxes on people making under $400,000. Now, I want to tell you what the … federal program that administers, that looks at the effects of legislation on taxes.

It says that 97 percent of people making between $100,000 and $200,000 will see a tax increase. It says 91 percent of people making between $75,000 and $100,000 will see a tax increase, 61 percent of people making between $40,000 and $50,000, and 24 percent of people making between $10,000 and $12,000.

But let me say this. They’re wrong in this sense. One hundred percent of everybody making over $10,000 – in fact, 100 percent of everybody making anything – will see a significant tax increase for one reason: the inflation that the Democrats have put into our system.

Because here’s the reason. Let’s try to keep it real simple. If your family of two is making $80,000, that would be two people averaging $40,000 a piece. If your family of two is making $80,000, then you’re in the 24 percent tax bracket and you also are paying Social Security and Medicare out of your wages.

So for every additional dollar that you earn, you’re going to pay 32 percent more in taxes. But this year, the first nine percent of your pay raise is to keep pace with inflation. But when you get that nine percent pay raise, which most people are not, by the way, 32 percent of the nine percent is going to pay higher taxes.

And so that family making $80,000 is going to see a pay raise of approximately $7,000 to $8,000. But 32 percent of that goes to pay taxes, either Social Security or Medicare, or income taxes on their pay raise. So they’re not keeping pace with inflation.

And Joe Manchin and the Democrats are the ones responsible for it. Let me just go over the amount of spending. When the Democrats got into office, the very first thing they did was they passed the infrastructure bill of $1.2 trillion.

And by the way, that’s almost all pork. Only 10 percent of that money is actually going to roads and bridges. The rest of it is going to a bunch of other stuff that has nothing to do with roads and bridges. $1.9 trillion was the next amount they spent, and that was for so-called COVID relief.

Then they spent, now recently, $400 billion on a so-called CHIPS bill, which is nothing but a pork bill for the chip companies that the Biden administration favors, because it has all kinds of strings attached to it.

And then most recently – and Joe Manchin seems most proud of this because his wife now gets to control a billion dollars in the local organization up there that’s getting a billion dollars, that Joe Manchin’s wife is the head of.

It’s $900 billion of new spending. And here’s where that money is going. It’s most interesting. $369 billion is going on energy and climate efforts. By the way, they’re taxing the heck out of the fossil fuel industry.

That’s part of the list of industries that they are targeting. And I want to talk about that, by the way, further in the program, Michael, about this particular thing. Then, $300 billion for green loan guarantees. $300 billion for green loan guarantees.

Remember Solyndra and all those companies that went broke? So that will end up being, boy, you talk about political pork there. Then $80 billion to double the number of IRS agents. Now, I want to talk about the implications of that also.

So those are two things that we’ll have some great stuff to talk about. But the list goes on, $60 billion for environmental justice initiatives. Exactly what that is, who knows. But you can bet your bippy that it is pork-laden.

And so what you have is, you have inflation. And by the way, this latest bill is very inflationary, because almost all of this money is spent in 36 months and the so-called tax revenue is collected over 10 years.

Listen to the Crommentary:

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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.