Category: Blaze Media
FTC slams CarShield: $10M scam exposed
Most drivers don’t expect to hear from the federal government — unless something has gone very wrong.
But this month, more than 168,000 Americans opened their mailboxes to find checks from the Federal Trade Commission, tied to a case that exposed widespread deception in the vehicle service contract industry.
The FTC’s action may be a turning point, signaling that regulators are paying close attention to misleading automotive advertising.
The fallout is significant: More than $9.6 million is being returned to consumers who were misled and often left paying for repairs they believed were covered by CarShield and American Auto Shield.
It’s one of the largest automotive-related refunds of the year — and it raises serious questions about how these companies operate, what consumers should watch for, and whether the settlement goes far enough.
Scam watch
After years investigating automotive scams and pushing for transparency, I can say this case highlights a deeper problem: service contract companies relying on aggressive marketing, inflated promises, and fine print that favors the seller.
In July 2024, CarShield and American Auto Shield — two of the most recognizable names in the extended warranty business — agreed to pay nearly $10 million to settle an FTC complaint. The allegations included misleading advertising, deceptive telemarketing, and coverage claims that didn’t match reality.
Many drivers believed they were buying protection for major repairs, sometimes paying up to $120 a month. When problems arose, they discovered that coverage often disappeared behind exclusions, denials, and carefully crafted contract language.
Cover story
According to the FTC, the companies advertised that virtually all repairs — or all repairs to “covered” systems — would be paid. Drivers were told they could use any repair shop and receive free rental cars during breakdowns. Instead, many were stuck with bills they thought they had avoided.
The FTC argued these claims persuaded consumers to buy service contracts that failed to deliver. Under the settlement, both companies must stop deceptive marketing practices and ensure that endorsements and testimonials reflect real, verifiable customer experiences — an important change given how central celebrity endorsements were to their advertising.
Checks and balances
Refunds are already under way. Checks have been mailed to 168,179 affected drivers and must be cashed within 90 days. No banking information or payment is required. Consumers with questions are directed to the refund administrator or the FTC’s website.
This action is part of a broader FTC push to hold companies accountable in industries where consumers are easily confused or misled. In 2024 alone, FTC enforcement returned more than $339 million to consumers nationwide. Automotive issues remain a major focus because unexpected repair costs can quickly become a financial burden.
Vehicle service contracts — often sold as “extended warranties” — can be useful when offered clearly and honestly. Too often, however, consumers are sold peace of mind that turns into high monthly payments and denied claims, with exclusions overwhelming any real benefit.
RELATED: Ford just lost $20 billion on its EV investment
Bloomberg/Getty Images
New scrutiny
The FTC’s move may signal a shift toward tougher oversight of automotive advertising. Whether it leads to broader industry reform remains to be seen, but companies using vague language and unrealistic promises are clearly facing more scrutiny.
Drivers deserve clear information and coverage that matches what is advertised. This case is a reminder to stay skeptical: If a deal sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
Bottom line: Big print gives, small print takes away. Read the contract carefully — because most of these deals simply aren’t worth it.
Diddy sent President Trump a letter, but he won’t be pardoned, POTUS reveals
Despite a relationship spanning more than 20 years, President Donald Trump said he will not intervene in Sean “Diddy” Combs’ jail sentence.
Combs is currently serving a 50-month prison sentence after being charged for two counts of transportation to engage in prostitution in 2025.
‘I was very friendly with him. I got along with him great and seemed like a nice guy.’
After the president stated in October that Combs had asked him for a pardon, he recently confirmed to the New York Times that the request came in the form of a letter.
Pardon me
The two-hour interview with the Times serves as the first official confirmation that the letter to the president exists, with Trump allegedly saying he was willing to show it off to reporters, but ultimately did not.
Trump reportedly told the outlet that Combs “asked me for a pardon,” which was “through a letter,” but revealed he is not considering granting the request.
RELATED: Diddy’s Big Circus
Photo by Sonia Moskowitz/Getty Images
“I have a lot of people [who] have asked me for pardons,” the president said in October. “I call him Puff Daddy, has asked me for a pardon,” he added, referring to one of Combs’ previous aliases as an artist.
Friendship ended?
As Blaze News reported, Trump told Newsmax in 2025 that the two had a prior relationship, but Diddy apparently made remarks that turned the president sour.
“I was very friendly with him. I got along with him great and seemed like a nice guy. I didn’t know him well. But when I ran for office, he was very hostile. And it’s hard. Like you, we’re human beings, and we don’t like to have things cloud our judgment. But when you knew someone and you were fine, and then you run for office and he made some terrible statements.”
“He was essentially, I guess, sort of half-innocent,” Trump included.
RELATED: 25 years later, the gaming console that caused so much chaos is still No. 1
Photo by Richard Corkery/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images
Combs over
Recently, Combs has asked an appeals court to overturn his convictions and release him from jail.
A report from the BBC said Diddy’s attorney made the argument that the producer was improperly sentenced and that his conduct was not criminal in nature.
In addition, photos have resurfaced of Trump and Combs standing side by side, appearing to get along in 1998. The photos were taken at the Mercedes-Benz Polo Challenge in Bridgehampton, Long Island.
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How a pro-life law in Kentucky lets mothers get away with murder
Melinda Spencer allegedly took abortion pills, ended the life of her unborn son, and buried his remains in a shallow grave in her backyard.
Yet a law in Kentucky exempting women from prosecution after obtaining an abortion — a law supported by the most influential pro-life organization in the state — appears to have prevented prosecutors from holding Spencer accountable for murder.
If a state refuses to make murder illegal for everyone, then some human beings will remain unprotected by design.
According to court documents cited by local media, Spencer, 35, told Kentucky State Police that the child “was not her boyfriend’s, and she did not want him to find out she was pregnant with another man’s baby.”
To conceal the pregnancy, Spencer allegedly ordered abortion pills online, intending to end the life of her unborn child without medical supervision.
Police say Spencer took the pills the day after Christmas, placed her deceased son in a light bulb box, and buried him in a shallow grave in her backyard. An autopsy determined the child was around 20 weeks’ gestation at the time of his death.
Initially Spencer was charged with first-degree fetal homicide, abuse of a corpse, concealing the birth of an infant, and tampering with physical evidence.
This week, however, Kentucky prosecutors dropped the homicide charge — not because they doubt that Spencer intentionally caused the death of her unborn child but because Kentucky law explicitly prohibits prosecuting a pregnant woman who murders her own unborn child.
Miranda King, the prosecutor overseeing the case, acknowledged this limitation directly. In a public statement, she explained that the relevant statute “prohibits the prosecution of a pregnant woman who caused the death of her unborn child.” Spencer still faces the remaining, lesser charges.
King made clear that this frustrating outcome was not her preference.
“I sought this job with the intention of being a pro-life prosecutor but must do so within the boundaries allowed by the Kentucky state law I’m sworn to defend,” she said. “I will prosecute the remaining lawful charges fully and fairly.”
Kentucky is widely regarded as a conservative state with strong pro-life laws. Many Americans assume abortion was effectively banned there after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. This case exposes how incomplete that assumption is.
RELATED: Why the pro-life movement fails without a Christian worldview
jcphoto via iStock/Getty Images
Kentucky’s leading pro-life advocacy organization, Kentucky Right to Life, has long supported laws that shield women from criminal liability for abortion. In practice, this ensures that abortion remains legal for women, even if clinics are closed.
In 2021, Kentucky Right to Life joined more than 70 other pro-life organizations in signing a national letter declaring opposition to “any measure seeking to criminalize or punish women” who obtain abortions.
Since then, the organization has opposed multiple abolition bills that would have established equal protection under the law for unborn children — specifically because such legislation would allow for the prosecution of mothers who willfully procure abortions.
Addia Wuchner, Kentucky Right to Life’s executive director, opposed an abolition bill in 2023 on the grounds that it might expose mothers to criminal charges. She took the same position last year, arguing that women are victims of coercion by the abortion industry.
That framing has deadly consequences.
Photo by Mandel NGAN / AFP via Getty Images
Following Spencer’s arrest, Wuchner publicly expressed sympathy for the accused, describing Spencer as likely being “on her own” and calling that “probably the greatest tragedy,” before adding that “of course … a child’s life was lost.”
The ordering is revealing. The alleged murder of a child was treated as secondary to the emotional state of the alleged murderer. Empathy displaced justice and accountability.
There are cases in which women are coerced into abortions under genuine duress. But coercion cannot be presumed as a universal explanation. By all available evidence, Spencer appears to have acted deliberately. Kentucky law nevertheless forecloses full accountability — and ensures that the central act in this case cannot be adjudicated as homicide.
Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe, states like Kentucky have continued to see record abortion levels, largely through self-managed chemical abortions ordered online. Laws that categorically exempt women from prosecution guarantee this outcome.
If a state refuses to make murder illegal for everyone, then some human beings will remain unprotected by design. And when that exemption applies even in cases involving concealment, burial, and admitted intent, justice becomes impossible by statute.
So long as that remains the case, women who willfully kill their unborn children in Kentucky will continue to get away with murder.
Young white Americans want their own identity politics now — and conservatives shouldn’t be surprised
After years of DEI, affirmative action, and replacement-level immigration, some young white Americans are beginning to demand political representation as a group. Conservatives are panicking about this rise in “white identity politics,” but they shouldn’t be surprised at all, says BlazeTV host Auron MacIntyre.
“For decades, whites have watched every other group in America successfully demand political action as a block from both the left and the right. Democrats build their entire party around racial grievance, but even conservatives are quick to speak to the needs of minority communities as a collective group,” Auron says.
Even though conservatives are typically anti-identity politics, they nonetheless “cater to them for any group except their core constituency: white Americans.”
Now some of those white Americans are saying, “Enough — we demand the same treatment.”
Massive immigration has brought in large groups of people who naturally stick together ethnically and gain advantages through nepotism and tribalism, Auron explains. This makes pure individual merit, which whites are forced to rely on, a losing strategy, especially when they’re already demonized for their race by universities, corporations, and media outlets.
For years the message has been: “[Whites] aren’t allowed to advocate as a group like everyone else gets to, but they are allowed to be punished as a group.”
The fact that some whites are now calling for ethnic representation is merely “predictable results,” Auron says.
“If conservatives were serious about stopping the rise of collective white identity politics, they would stop lecturing young white people for noticing the obvious. They would instead attack the systemic bias against whites in corporations and academia. … If they were serious, conservatives would initiate an immigration moratorium and would aggressively prosecute ethnic cartels in the United States,” he continues.
“Conservative leaders should be lecturing blacks, Indians, Hispanics, and Jews just as aggressively as they lecture whites about ethnocentrism, if for no other reason than whites, you know, actually vote for the GOP, while all these other groups — outside of Hispanic males in the last election — vote overwhelmingly Democrat.”
“In short, show young white people that they can succeed without ethnocentrism by actually addressing and punishing ethnocentrism that is currently practiced by every other group here in the United States. Gather your courage and talk to the minorities who are already practicing the very behavior you claim to fear.”
To hear more of Auron’s commentary and analysis, watch the video above.
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Pope Leo calls out ‘inclusive’ language as a painful, ‘Orwellian’ movement in the West
Pope Leo XIV says Western nations need to guarantee the freedom of expression.
The pope gave his “State of the World” speech from the Vatican in Vatican City on Friday and delivered remarks that may agitate some of his more liberal followers.
‘A new Orwellian-style language is developing which, in an attempt to be increasingly inclusive, ends up excluding.’
Real name Robert Prevost, the noted Chicago White Sox fan championed free speech when he explained that words need to once again be used to “express distinct and clear realities.”
This is paramount in order to engage in “authentic dialogue,” the Catholic leader continued, noting that truth-telling is necessary for “preventing conflicts.”
This led Pope Leo into pointing out a “paradox” in modern self-expression in the West, which only strengthens his belief in the idea that freedom of speech and expression should be guaranteed.
“It is painful to see how, especially in the West, the space for genuine freedom of expression is rapidly shrinking,” the pope said. “At the same time, a new Orwellian-style language is developing which, in an attempt to be increasingly inclusive, ends up excluding those who do not conform to the ideologies that are fueling it.”
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The 70-year-old explained that the inclusivity paradox leads to other consequences, such as the restriction of human rights, including “freedom of conscience.”
Those were not the only remarks the pope gave that were seemingly controversial. Rather, he also spoke strongly against the act of surrogacy.
Leo XIV said that surrogacy amounts to transforming gestation into a “negotiable service” that violates the dignity of both the child and the mother. Surrogacy reduces the baby to a “product,” the pope said, and causes a mother to exploit her body and the generative process, which distorts “the original relational calling of the family.”
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Photo by Simone Risoluti – Vatican Media via Vatican Pool/Getty Images
Observers of the speech, reportedly including 184 ambassadors from states that have diplomatic relations with the Vatican, also heard the pope condemn assisted suicide as a form of “deceptive” compassion.
The leader said that the elderly and isolated — “who at times struggle to find a reason to continue living” — should be offered solutions to their suffering, such as “palliative care … rather than encouraging deceptive forms of compassion such as euthanasia.”
Leo concluded his speech by emphasizing the need for peaceful dialogue and living in truth. He added that a “peaceful world” is built by those who act from humble hearts.
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Violent repeat offender brutally beats up elderly whites, Mexicans in racially motivated attack, officials say
A violent repeat offender brutally beat up elderly whites and Mexicans in a racially motivated attack in Arizona earlier this week, officials said.
In fact, 62-year-old Derek Kirven admitted to police he was targeting white and Mexican victims at the Escalante Multi-Generational Center in Tempe, KPNX-TV reported, citing newly filed court documents.
‘At that point, he essentially lost control. … He started to assault these people by punching them, throwing them to the ground.’
The station said Wednesday’s assault left several victims with serious injuries, including broken bones.
Tempe police said Kirven walked into a members-only area around 9 a.m. and was asked to leave because he was not a member, KPNX reported.
“He tried to come in, and he was told to leave because he was not a member, and then around 11:30 a.m., he came back,” Officer Jessica Ells told the station.
Police said that’s when Kirven snapped and began attacking people, many of whom were seated and waiting for lunch, KPNX said.
“At that point, he essentially lost control and began attacking all the members who were inside the center,” Ells added to the station.
“He started to assault these people by punching them, throwing them to the ground.”
You can view video of the attack here. A city of Tempe security guard eventually detained Kirven until police arrived, the station said.
One victim suffered a broken wrist, and another was left with a broken nose, KPNX said, citing court documents. A third victim — who has autism and suffers from seizures — was punched and knocked to the ground, the station noted.
What’s more, some victims were using walkers and had no way to defend themselves, police added to KPNX.
A fourth victim’s hearing aid, valued at $4,000, was damaged, the station said, adding that the victim was concerned the attack may have aggravated a previous open-heart surgery.
More from KPNX:
During an interview with police, Kirven said he felt staff asked him to leave because he is black, according to court documents.
He told detectives he intentionally targeted white and Mexican people and said he hoped more than one of them would die from their injuries, court documents show.
Court documents also state Kirven told police he would assault people again if given the chance.
Court papers indicate Kirven used racial slurs when referring to the victims and toward a Hispanic detective during the interview, KTVK-TV reported, adding that investigators said he called another detective names like “confederate,” “hillbilly” and “white trash.”
According to police reports, staff at the center offered Kirven a membership earlier Wednesday morning, but he did not have identification, the station said.
Kirven has an extensive criminal history in Arizona and New Mexico, KPNX said, citing court documents. The station added that he served time in New Mexico’s prison system for aggravated battery several years ago.
KPNX also said records show Kirven is a transient with felony convictions across multiple states, including kidnapping and aggravated battery, and he had two outstanding warrants at the time of his arrest.
Kirven was booked on multiple counts of aggravated assault, disorderly conduct, trespassing, and criminal damage, KTVK reported.
Kirven is now in the custody of the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office and is being held on $500,000 bond, KPNX said.
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Is Western civilization really doomed — or does history show a path forward?
Anyone who’s been paying attention knows that Western civilization is on the brink of collapse. The values that built it have been ripped up and condemned as antiquated, imperialist, or white supremacist.
But instead of despairing, Westerners ought to take heart in one trait the West has exemplified time and again: resilience.
Historian Allen Guelzo, co-author of “The Golden Thread” book series, tells BlazeTV host Steve Deace that “unlike other civilizations, which have risen, reached a certain peak, and then gone rapidly into decline, the Western tradition … has shown a remarkable resilience to rise, to falter, to look like it’s about to slide downwards maybe into the abyss of forgetfulness, but yet somehow finding the way to recover itself.”
This bouncing back has happened over and over again, Guelzo says.
“We had a moment like that at the end of the Roman Empire when it appeared that we were about to disappear into what is commonly called the Dark Ages,” he recaps.
It happened again after the Black Plague of the 1300s wiped out “two-thirds of the European population” and again after the Thirty Years’ War left so much death and chaos in its wake, it appeared that “violence and power were about to stamp out any notion of law and inquiry.”
In more recent years, the West faced two World Wars and the greatest genocide in Western history.
And yet, in all of these cases, “there was something which bounced back in this Western tradition,” Guelzo remarks optimistically.
Today, we stand at yet another “civilizational moment” where destruction is knocking at our door.
Guelzo is hopeful our future will mirror our resilient past, but for that to happen, people — especially younger generations — must cultivate an interest in history.
“History itself tells us who we have been. What we are today is what we were in the past,” he says. “The great Marcus Tullius Cicero … once said that anyone who remained ignorant of their history was condemned perpetually to live as a child, and I think that’s true.”
“The Golden Thread” series, which Guelzo co-authored with former Harvard history professor James Hankins, are exactly the kind of books that will spark an interest in Western history.
“It is a good deal more than just long lists of names, dates, places — which is the kind of thing that most people tell me they dread about history,” Guelzo laughs. “These books are also full of ideas; they are full of philosophy; they are full of art; they are full of great paintings; they are full of music.”
“It’s full of color. It’s full of life. It’s full of acknowledgments that the Western tradition has sometimes put its foot down wrongly. It’s made mistakes. People have suffered for that, and yet, even with that, the vitality of that tradition has been one of recovery; it has been one of uplift; it has been one that promotes human flourishing,” he adds.
It is this knowledge that can save Western civilization from collapse, Guelzo tells Deace.
“We can save it because it has been saved before.”
To hear more of the conversation, watch the episode above.
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Colbert praises Soviet feminism — forgets the Gulags, mass murder, and forced labor
By the time of its collapse in 1991, the Soviet regime had overseen a democide of tens of millions of Russians, thrown millions of people into the regime’s hellish Gulag labor camp system, and spent nearly 70 years brutally persecuting those at odds with dissenting views, especially Christians.
Stephen Colbert, the departing host of CBS’ “The Late Show” who pushed COVID-19 vaccination during the pandemic, recently suggested that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics wasn’t all bad on account of its purported feminism.
‘Russia and the Soviet Union were the vanguard of world feminism.’
During her Monday appearance on Colbert’s show, Soviet-born reporter Julia Ioffe peddled her new book about the feminist experiment in the USSR — a “fairy-tale country” whose communist regime forced women to work, legalized abortion, ushered in no-fault divorce, and took other efforts to transform men and women into interchangeable units of labor devoid of strong loyalties outside the state.
“I remember seeing Soviet posters basically saying, ‘In the West women are not allowed to do any of this,'” Colbert told Ioffe. “There was a forward-looking feminist agenda to the communist enterprise.”
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Julia Ioffe and Stephen Colbert. Photo by Scott Kowalchyk/CBS via Getty Images.
“I think a lot of people forget, including Russians, that Russia and the Soviet Union were the vanguard of world feminism,” said Ioffe.
Ioffe’s apparent efforts to paint the Soviet Union as the “vanguard of world feminism” didn’t get past critics.
Newsbusters noted that whereas women’s right to vote, which was granted by the Provisional Government that replaced Tsar Nicholas II in 1917, was taken away by “Colbert’s Soviet poster children” after the October Revolution, 15 American states allowed women to vote before 1917, and the 19th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution was ratified in 1920 without suffering the country to communism.
Although Ioffe acknowledged that women’s right to vote in the USSR became “largely irrelevant very quickly,” she suggested to Colbert that there were other perks made available to women under the totalitarian regime, including access to free higher education, abortion, child support, no-fault civil divorce, and paid maternity leave.
Ioffe noted further that the regime gifted roughly 800,000 women, mostly teenage girls, the responsibility to fight in active combat during World War II.
Colbert, apparently upset to learn that the USSR’s efforts to maximize the utility of women to the state dissipated over time, asked, “Why did it go away?”
“Because men,” answered Ioffe.
“I’m so sorry,” said Colbert.
Colbert, who recently told fellow travelers that a 2028 presidential run was not in the works despite speculation to the contrary, is leaving “The Late Show” in May.
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America tried to save the planet and forgot to save itself
Let’s face it: $20 trillion is a lot of money.
One would expect a big bang to follow the spending of 20,000 billion dollars. It’s a lot of money! In fact, it’s pretty much the total present value of America’s GDP.
The American economy sent trillions to our south and east — putting America second, hollowing out the American middle class, and neutralizing the American dream.
This is the total amount spent globally — largely by Europe and the United States — in a coordinated effort by the developed world to decarbonize the global economy. China, in contrast, sold windmills and solar panels worldwide while opening a new coal-fired power plant every month.
What was the net effect of this “Green” Marshall Plan? Hydrocarbon consumption continued to increase anyway. All that was achieved was a tiny reduction, just 2%, in the share of overall energy supplied by hydrocarbons. Put simply, as the energy pie got bigger and all forms of energy supply increased, hydrocarbons ended up with a slightly smaller share of a larger pie.
We also saw the deindustrialization of the European and American economies — not just with higher prices at the gas pump and on electric bills, but a stealth green tax that was passed on to consumers on everything. This is the culprit of our American and global affordability crisis. So much treasure and pain for a 2% reduction in the share of hydrocarbons.
Ironically, a byproduct of this Green Hunger Games was political populism.
What a waste. The worst bang for the public and private buck ever. Yet the Chicken Little believers of the Church of Settled Science and the grifters who profited from it will still sing in unison that it failed because they did not go far enough. If only the global community spent and regulated more!
In contrast, the Marshall Plan (1948-1951) rebuilt a decimated Europe into an industrial, interconnected, and peaceful powerhouse. It was a great success by any measure. At the time, its price tag was huge: $13.3 billion in nominal 1948-1951 dollars, equivalent to approximately $150 billion in today’s dollars.
Since a trillion is such a large number, let’s divide $20 trillion by an inflation-adjusted Marshall Plan of $150 billion, and we have 133 Marshall opportunities. Money was not the problem. To give a sense of the comparative bang for buck, by the Marshall program’s end, the aggregated gross national product of the participating nations rose by more than 32% and industrial output increased by a remarkable 40%.
President Trump has been on the global funding rounds and has secured more than $18 trillion in foreign investment. That’s roughly the equivalent of 120 Marshall Plans — just 13 shy of $20 trillion — to be invested here and nowhere else.
Unlike NAFTA, through which the rich got richer under the banner of free markets in exchange for cheaper consumer goods, Trump’s policy is a recipe for prosperity for all Americans.
RELATED: Trump administration saves billions in simple move globalists and climate activists alike will hate
Photo by David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Making these investments a reality in America will require a growing army of blue- and white-collar workers. With the wealth that it creates, our debt could be paid down and, finally, retired. Social Security and Medicare would be placed on a solid footing for time immemorial. All our public obligations to one another would be met by ever-growing prosperity, not by borrowed money and suffocating debt service.
Nothing approaching this level of intentional investment in a single country has ever been done. Yes, a similar tranche of greenbacks was burned with no discernible environmental benefit and great economic hardship for all. And yes, the American economy, under the guise of comparative advantage, sent trillions to our south and east — putting America second, hollowing out the American middle class, and neutralizing the American dream.
Trump’s plan is the opposite of both failed experiments. Like the original Marshall Plan, Trump’s is a recipe for the reindustrialization of the American economy and military, and it is not going to be fueled by windmills and solar farms but with hydrocarbons and uranium. That’s the Trump plan. It has merit.
Yet if we look at the polls, Trump is under water, and his base is showing signs of stress fractures. You bring peace to the Middle East, stop six other wars, and bring in some $20 trillion in America First investments within your first year, and you come home to find yourself under water and called a “lame duck.” Democracies are known to be fickle and hard to please, but this is still rich — and it will result in poverty if it continues.
Without the use of Trump’s tariffs and dealmaking, there would not be $20 trillion looking to onshore in the United States. You can blame Trump for higher costs on bananas and coffee, but it is the cost of electricity and health care — not the cost of coffee and bananas — that is roiling kitchen-table economics.
Vice President JD Vance recently made the right call for popular and populist patience. Those who are impatient should look at the offsets already passed, such as no taxes on Social Security, tips, and overtime. That helps pay for bananas and coffee and then some.
The sovereign wealth funds that are presently lining up on our shores are coming here based on promises made by a can-do president speaking for a can-do nation. While Trump is a can-do guy, are “We the People” still a can-do people? Or do we at least want to return to becoming a can-do people again?
The “can’t-do” forces are legion, and they are the ones now championing the affordability crisis they caused. When America was a can-do nation, we built the Empire State Building in a year. Today, it would take years to get a permit.
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Photo by Jim WATSON/AFP via Getty Images
Those willing to invest such money will require some certitude that the power they will need will be there to “build, baby, build.” If not, the money and the opportunity will pass before they have the possibility to take needed root.
And what about us, the American family, worker, and business continuing to struggle under the legacy of throttling energy privation? In short, we all have a common good — a shared interest — in righting the wrongs that control our grid and our nation’s future.
The good news is that a bill was introduced in the House during the government shutdown. It’s called the “Affordable, Reliable, Clean Energy Security Act.” Unlike Obamacare, which clocked in at 903 pages, this bill is a lean 763 words. If it becomes law — and it should — it would change everything for the better, unlike Obamacare, which is a recipe for unaffordability.
Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act was missing this one thing. His short- and long-term America First ambitions would be significantly strengthened by making this energy bill law before the midterms. Executive orders don’t provide the energy security these investors require or the American people deserve.
$20 trillion is a lot of money. Coming to our shores is a new lease on the American experiment as we enter our 250th birthday, hopelessly divided and broke. Let us come together to solve not just the affordability crisis but also set the conditions for greatness for the next 250 years.
Editor’s note: This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.
