Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. This is Declan Garvey, editor of the Morning Dispatch.

And today we're going to talk about the Inflation Reduction Act.

After more than a year of negotiations, stops and starts, rebrandings and renaming,

President Joe Biden finally signed the Inflation Reduction Act into law this week.

While significantly downsized from its original Build Back Better version,

Biden's landmark climate and healthcare legislation makes significant changes to our tax code

and is being hailed as the biggest federal investment in climate change mitigation efforts in American history.

It's also, as this week's guest, Scott Linsichom argues, a libertarian nightmare.

Scott is the director of General Economics at the Cato Institute and the author of the Capitalism newsletter here at the Dispatch.

On today's episode, we talk less about the politics of the bill and more about what he sees as the biggest problems with what's actually in it.

From its questionable budget math to its Jekyll and Hyde approach to business investment and its doubling down on green energy subsidies that didn't work out so well a decade ago.

Plus, stick around till the end for a conversation about why industrial policy is seemingly the only thing lawmakers in both parties can agree on nowadays.

Scott, welcome to this med-punch.

Thanks for having me back.

Before we drill down on some of the specific provisions, I want to take a big picture look at the overall size of the bill.

Democrats labeled it the Inflation Reduction Act, I think mostly so that Joe Manchin could declare Build Back Better is dead in his press release announcing it.

But there's been plenty of debate over whether it actually will bring down inflation, whether it will reduce the deficit that the way that they say.

Purely on a revenue raised money spent calculation, a couple nonpartisan estimates from the Congressional Budget Office and joint committee on taxation.

A found the legislation would reduce the deficit by about $300 billion over the next decade.

That's obviously if the extensions to the Affordable Care Act subsidies are not extended beyond the three years that they currently are in this legislation, which is not a fair bet per se.

What is your thought on all that are those estimates an accurate reflection of how you see this legislation playing out over the next 10 years?

Not really, no.

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