VIDEO: How States are Taking the Lead in Nation’s Growing Economic Crisis

This week on ALEC TV Livestream, Catherine Mortensen, ALEC Public Affairs Director, and Jonathan Williams, ALEC Executive Vice President of Policy and Chief Economist, are joined by Grover Norquist, founder and president of Americans for Tax Reform, to talk about how states are leading the way in addressing our nation’s growing economic crisis.

Grover Norquist: Inflation is higher than average wage increase so most Americans are actually moving backwards; they’re losing, they’re poorer than they were before Biden was president. Higher spending, the war on energy, making it difficult to have pipelines, looking for new energy, regulations, tax increases, threatened tax increases, and regulations – that’s what gave us the problem. Biden’s answer is more of the same; this is Jimmy Carter’s presidency relived with no learning going on at all.

Catherine Mortensen: Jonathan, your reaction?

Jonathan Williams: Talk about an out of touch federal response to the scenario. They are doubling down on all the things, as Grover said, that have caused this inflationary problem and, if anything, you get this ‘holier than thou’ sense from so many in the Biden administration and the left wing of Congress. They are saying that this is what we need to transition away from energy. It’s almost a Marie Antoinette scenario to say the high prices are actually good for us. You hear these just horrible, painful stories of individuals now needing to cut back on their overall daily lives to accommodate the big, bad government policies coming out of Washington. It is unbelievably sad to see what has happened because of the war on energy, big tax and spend agenda and the threat of higher taxes. Let’s not forget, the huge Trump tax cuts that were passed into law at the end of 2017 are scheduled to expire for individuals in the next few years. You add that to what we’re seeing in inflation and we are absolutely staring down the barrel of stagflation for the first time since Jimmy Carter. That’s something that’s horribly painful and we should all be concerned about.

Catherine Mortensen: Grover, are you satisfied with the response coming from the Biden administration? Many people are using the word tone deaf to describe what’s happening in Washington.

Grover Norquist: The challenge for Biden is that his policies are deliberately increasing the cost of energy.  The reason why we don’t have ‘green energy’ in meaningful numbers is because it’s much more expensive than normal energy. It’s only intermittent – it only works when the wind is blowing, it only works when the sun’s turned on. It doesn’t work at night, it doesn’t work when or where it’s not windy and it’s very expensive to transmit across lines. He is deliberately increasing the cost of real energy in order to get you used to the high cost so when you then are asked, “well how would you like solar?” the answer is a very expensive yes. The other stuff is now expensive too so it is a deliberate effort to push people into a political structure for energy, rather than economic structure.

Watch the full video here