But it isn’t Big Tech companies in Silicon Valley or the Wall Street financial company “fat cats” or big banks or Walmart. They pay billions in taxes.

The culprits here are the very companies Biden is in bed with: green energy firms.

It turns out that despite all the promises over the past decade about how renewable energy is the future of power production in America, by far the biggest tax dodgers in the country are the wind and solar power industries. Over the past several decades, the green energy lobby – what I call the climate-change-industrial complex – isn’t paying its fair share. That’s because the vast majority of these companies pay nearly ZERO income taxes.

But they wade in rivers of federal direct and indirect subsidies that keep these zombie companies alive. Over the past two decades, the renewable energy lobby has collected more than one-quarter trillion dollars in subsidies – payments that we’ve been assured over and over would be temporary. The argument for these grants, loans, tax abatements and other sweetheart kisses is that these were “infant industries” in need of a Head Start program for CEOs. Except these companies have never even reached puberty after all these years.

What’s worse is that Biden keeps spoiling the children with lavish gifts for bad performance. A new report by tax expert Adam Michel at the Cato Institute finds the green energy subsidies – mostly created by Biden policies like the so-called Inflation Reduction Act – will drain the Treasury of as much as $1.8 trillion over 10 years.

The Cato report finds that since its passage, “the estimated cost of the IRA’s new and expanded energy tax credits increased dramatically.”

These tax shelters are just a form of Aid to Dependent Corporations. They never seem to want to cut the umbilical cord.

What have we gotten for this mountain of taxpayer-funded green energy largesse? Nothing, really. Today, we still get 80% of our energy in America from fossil fuels and nuclear power. Wind and solar are stuck at less than 10%. This is some investment we’re making.

Meanwhile, Biden keeps railing against companies that pay no income tax. He’s advocated a mandatory 15% minimum corporate tax. But guess what industry is explicitly exempt from the minimum? The green energy lobby.

It’s just a reminder that a lot of people are getting really, really rich off climate-change hysteria.

The “green” in green energy doesn’t stand for a cleaner environment. It stands for the color of money. Yours and mine.

Sound off about this article on The Liberty Daily Substack.

Even with all our problems, the United States is the unrivaled alpha male nation. The dollar is the only currency that matters globally (the Euro and BRICS are weak little sisters), and for the first time, the U.S. economy produces far more than all of socialist Europe combined. Our Magnificent Seven Technology firms — Amazon, Apple, Google, Invidia, Meta, Microsoft and Tesla — are close to being worth more than all of the stocks combined in any other country With the exception of China.

But the Biden bull stock market story isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Most of the gains in the market have only made up for the miserable returns in Biden’s disastrous first two years in office when stocks lost almost 15 percent of their value. In other words, for the most part, the last 14 months have simply made up for the lost ground during the 2022 rout in stocks.

Yes, it’s true that in nominal terms stocks are at record highs. But one of the first rules of investing is that you need to pay attention to your after-inflation profits. If you make an investment in a widget company and in 10 years that stock has doubled in value but the price level in dollars of everything else has doubled, sorry, you’re no better off based on what you can buy with those profits.

So let’s see what has happened to stocks over the first three years of the Biden presidency — i.e, through the end of January 2024.

Over that period the price level has risen by about 18 percent. The real (inflation-adjusted) rate of return in the S&P 500 after three years of Biden is thus only 8%. This is fairly anemic and well below the average annual real rate of return since the New York Stock Exchange opened its doors, which is a three year average of more than 20%.

Biden’s performance is also much worse than the bull market under Trump. The S&P was up 36% in real terms at this time of Trump’s presidency, or more than four times better.

Trump has made the case that the rise in the stock market in recent months is a result of the higher likelihood that he will be elected in November. I don’t put too much stock in that claim. If the stock market tanks, is he responsible for that too?

However, an analysis by ace investor Scott Bessent and a member of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity economic council, finds that fluctuations in the stock market over the past year have correlated positively with the betting market odds that Trump will win. Right now he stands at just above 50 percent. This relationship could be spurious and of course by far the biggest factor that drives stock valuations is profits.

One last price of investment advice. Investors should pay attention to the Democratic agenda if they win in November. The Biden economic plan calls for doubling the capital gains tax, taxing unrealized capital gains, and raising both the corporate tax rate and the dividend tax. That is very bad news for sure for stocks. And that, you can take to the bank.

Sound off about this article on the Economic Collapse Substack.

Stephen Moore is a senior fellow with the Heritage Foundation and a co-founder of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity. He is co-author of the book “Trumponomics.”

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact [email protected].

It’s a miracle of private sector innovation and the magic of the free enterprise system that technologies that were only the play things of the super-rich a generation ago are now so ubiquitous that almost all of the poorest Americans have access — and even many of the poorest people in the most remote villages in Africa have smart phones.

Consider the lightning speed of deployment: home internet access reached half of Americans in 2000. Now it’s 92%. Today 19 out of 20 households have home access to the internet on their smart phones. Nearly nine of ten homes have broadband access.

No other technology — not cars, not radio, TV, cable TV, air conditioning — has been made so universally available at affordable prices to the masses so quickly.

Does this sound like a market that needs assistance from the government?

If you answered yes, you also probably believe that Al Gore invented the internet.

This didn’t happen by accident. In part it was due to smart public policy decisions made many years ago. Former congressman Chris Cox, who wrote the first bipartisan law in the 1990s to accelerate internet deployment, explains the successful strategy: “We achieved this rapid deployment by keeping internet regulation free and lawsuit free.” Bill Clinton, who was the president at the time, deserves credit too.

But now the Biden Administration — which never saw an industry it didn’t want to regulate and control — has deputized the Federal Communications Commission to police the internet. They are doing so under the guise of “preventing digital discrimination.”

It’s a preposterous claim because almost all blacks and Hispanics now HAVE internet and cell phones.

But to solve a fictitious problem, in 2021 Biden jammed through a Democratic Congress the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. That absurd bill appropriated $65 billion to help expand access to high-speed Internet — even though nearly everyone already had it.

But when the government regulators get involved in an industry — they don’t improve it — they find ways to strangle it. A good example was the so-called Net Neutrality law that socialized broadband hookup. That only effect of stalling out deployment and when the Trump administration repealed those rules, households had access to improved and speedier downloading capabilities.

Biden and the Democrats in Congress couldn’t resist playing the race card. The new law instructed the FCC to ensure that the billions in federal spending also “facilitate equal access” to the Internet.

The FCC lawyers then chose a standard known as “disparate impact,” which means if they can find a minority neighborhood somewhere at any time that lacks the same internet access as a high-income area, they can slap the telecom companies with a lawsuit. You can almost hear the trial lawyers drooling.

The accusers don’t even have to prove any intent to discriminate on the basis of race or ethnicity. These threats of lawsuits will inhibit — not spread internet access.

As an example of the unfairness of this policy, if a telecom provider offered a new service, but not enough members of a protected group sign up for the service, the FCC could impose a multi-million dollar fine and require the company to fix the inequities.

But this is a fishing expedition because the government can’t show any discrimination so far to punish. Don’t take my word for it. The FCC openly admits in its 235-page filing released in November that they could find “little or no evidence” of “intentional discrimination by industry participants.” And they found no evidence that discrimination “contributes to disparities in access to broadband internet service across the Nation.”

This would be like the government suing appliance stores for not selling enough TVs to blacks and Hispanics.

FCC commissioner Brendan Carr warns that Biden’s FCC has been given the authority to second guess every aspect of an Internet service provider’s operations, from network maintenance and installation to everyday business operations such as pricing and marketing.

In other words, the Democrats want to turn the internet into a regulated utility to oversee “access, content and pricing.” This will work about as well as airline regulations in the 1970s and health care regulations in the 2000s — both of which raised consumer prices and limited access.

Don’t be surprised if some of the telecom companies decide it’s not worth the threat of lawsuits and regulatory penalties and opt not to participate in expanding internet and broadband access. And in that case the poor and minorities will truly have reason to complain. That’s what always happens when government tries to fix things that don’t need fixing.

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Stephen Moore is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a co-founder of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity. His latest book is: “Govzilla: How the Relentless Growth of Government Is Devouring Our Economy.”

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact [email protected].

But as the saying goes, in Washington a crisis is always a terrible thing to waste and so we are seeing a reflexive response for more government intervention. No surprise that Senate Democrats immediately pounced into action calling on federal regulators to add another layer of rules including a complex increase in capital requirements on the U.S. banking system. Reacting quickly, the Federal Reserve, with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the FDIC released a joint proposal for the U.S. implementation of the so-called “Basel III regulatory framework.” These are complex rules, but in a nutshell, these rules would increase the amount of money that banks hold in reserve by 25%.

Sorry, this WON’T stop occasional bank failures of the hundreds of banks in America. What it will do is choke off lending to small businesses, homebuyers, and consumers that need loans.

The theory behind higher capital requirements is that banks will have more money in reserve to offset the losses from loans that go sour. Bank reserve requirements are a good safety precaution for sure. We don’t want banks to take on too much risk and then rush to a taxpayer safety net every time they are in trouble. But many well-respected government and private studies have found that American banks as a group are NOT undercapitalized, nor were the banks that failed.

Those banks simply made a series of bad investment/lending decisions. Ironically, some of the bad decisions, such as holding on to “safe” low-interest-paying Treasury bonds, which then lost market value when the Fed finally began raising interest rates, were a direct result of federal regulations.

The FDIC and the Federal Reserve are authorized to maintain the health and safety of America’s banks. Their job is to avoid 1930s-style bank runs that could do great damage to our financial system. Here’s the problem: these new rules would punish banks that are financially sound and shrink the available pool of loans available to homebuyers, small businesses, and lower income families. Less lending to qualified borrowers would mean less economic growth and less financial stability.

A forthcoming Committee to Unleash Prosperity study finds several negative – unintended – consequences of these rules based on the best research findings:

First, they will reduce the available pool of capital by an estimated $100 to $150 billion a year.

Second, the reduction in lending will reduce economic activity and thus shrink annual GDP by as much as 0.6%.

Third, because foreign banks are not subject to these regulations, American banks will lose competitiveness to foreign banks.

Fourth, and most importantly, it’s the little guy that gets squeezed out of the lending market. Small businesses and lower-income families are most likely to be the ones whose loans are rejected as a result of these new rules.

It’s simple: Lending is the oxygen supply that keeps our economy vibrant and competitive. Cutting it off, as the Basel rules are proposing, won’t make our economy safer, but will put it at greater risk.

Stephen Moore is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and an economist with FreedomWorks. His latest book is Govzilla: How the Relentless Growth of Government Is Devouring Our Economy.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact [email protected].