By Luis Miguel
Article Source

Once more, Washington politicians prove themselves to be more amenable to the whisperings of globalist billionaires than to the needs of their constituents.

A new piece at Bloomberg details some of the behind-the-scenes machinations that culminated in Tuesday’s signing of the Democrats’ so-called Inflation Reduction Act.

As the authors note, one of the individuals most responsible for making the legislation law is a name that had previously been little-associated with the policy: Bill Gates.

As it turns out, the Microsoft founder was instrumental in convincing Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) to cast his vote in favor of the bill, engaging in several talks with him to assuage his fears regarding taxes, jobs, and the deficit.

Manchin said “no” to the Inflation Reduction Act for a second time in December, citing concerns that it would worsen the debt and inflation. That’s when Gates made his move, meeting with Manchin and his wife at a Washington, D.C., restaurant about West Virginians’ needs.

Reportedly, the senator was determined to preserve coal jobs in his state — which the Biden-signed bill places in jeopardy with its climate provisions. Gates told Manchin that West Virginia coal workers would be able to jump over to nuclear plants instead.

The talks initially proved fruitless, with Manchin declaring on February 1 that the legislation was “dead.”

At this, Democrats pulled out all the stops to convince their hesitant colleague. One of the big names they deployed was former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, who assured Manchin that the bill wouldn’t make taxes on the middle class go up or increase the deficit.

Collin O’Mara, chief executive officer of the National Wildlife Federation, told Bloomberg that Democrat-recruited economists were able to “send this signal [to Manchin] that [the bill’s] going to help with the deficit.”

“It’s going to be slightly deflationary and it’s going to spur growth and investment in all these areas,” O’Mara added.

Gates then went back in, meeting up with Manchin at the Sun Valley media conference in Idaho.

“We had a talk about what was missing, what needed to be done,” said Gates. “And then after that it was a lot of phone calls.”

The article explains that Gates had been working on Manchin since 2019:

Gates started wooing Manchin and other senators who might prove pivotal for clean-energy policy in 2019 over a meal in Washington DC. “My dialogue with Joe has been going on for quite a while,” Gates said. “Almost everyone on the energy committee” — of which Manchin was then the senior-most Democrat — “came over and spent a few hours with me over dinner.”

With President Donald Trump in the White House, there was little prospect the dinner would turn into sweeping policy. Still, the evening was organized around a very Bill Gates theme: “The role of innovation in climate,” he recalled of the discussion. “How the US was really the only country, given how quickly this needs to get done, that has that innovation power in our universities, our national labs, our risk-taking ability.”

Gates asserted to the senators that the world needed American innovation unleashed if there was any hope of halting climate change, and it needed to start with leadership in Washington DC. “We’ve seen in industry after industry how that matters.”

As The New American’s David Kelly notes, the current high inflation is largely caused by last year’s Democratic spending of $1.9 trillion in the taxpayer-funded American Rescue Plan. Spending another $740 billion on climate and healthcare pet projects will only accelerate inflation, not reduce it.

And contrary to the assurances the legislation’s proponents gave to Manchin, the Inflation Reduction Act will adversely affect the middle class.

The Heritage Foundation estimates: “Taxpayers with adjusted gross incomes below $75,000 would ultimately shoulder an estimated $136 billion of new revenues from the corporate minimum tax and the IRS enforcement provisions, or about 26% of the total. Indeed, the revenues would fall disproportionately hard on taxpayers making less than $25,000 per year.”

While Manchin has previously been lauded by establishment voices as one of the few remaining moderate or even conservative Democrats, experience proves time and again that he is just as committed to big government and climate radicalism as the rest of his caucus.

As for Gates, it’s no surprise he was brought in to rally the troops for the bill’s passage. As one of the chief architects of the climate hysteria-based, big-government, New World Order agenda, Gates couldn’t sit on the sidelines and allow the Inflation Reduction Act to come crashing down.