The Inflation Reduction Act is a federal law discussed across several episodes of The Bob Zadek Show, where host Bob Zadek and his guests treated it as a case study in mislabeling, expanded regulation, and the growth of administrative power. The act was characterized as a Trojan horse for Green New Deal policies, a source of additional inflation rather than relief from it, and the funding mechanism for a greatly expanded Internal Revenue Service. Later episodes returned to the law’s IRS provisions and to its allocation of funds to localities for housing-related purposes.
The act as a misnamed Trojan horse
In a September 2022 episode, Bob Zadek introduced economist Thomas DiLorenzo, describing DiLorenzo’s blog post explaining how the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act is nothing other than a Trojan horse for Green New Deal socialist policies. Zadek called the legislation a legislative disaster and said the name itself was a misnomer, asking what had happened to truth in advertising and suggesting that a private business taking the same liberties in naming a product would be in prison. Lies, Damned Lies & the Inflation Reduction Act (2022)
DiLorenzo, described by Zadek as having taught economics at Loyola University Maryland and as being presently on the faculty of the Mises Institute, opened his discussion of the act by citing a Democratic congresswoman who had said the primary thing about the so-called Inflation Reduction Act is that it is really the Green New Deal. DiLorenzo said opinion polls paid for by the Democratic Party told them people were concerned about inflation more than almost anything else, so they called the bill the Inflation Reduction Act to make people think it was addressing their main concern. He called that a big lie, and said the even bigger lie was that the additional several hundred billion dollars of spending would pump up demand, that the Fed would print extra money to finance it, and that this would increase inflation. He also pointed to higher corporate taxes and especially higher energy taxes, arguing that the effect of the so-called Inflation Reduction Act is unequivocally to increase inflation. Lies, Damned Lies & the Inflation Reduction Act (2022)
Zadek qualified DiLorenzo’s statement that the administration wanted to destroy the energy industry, asking whether it would not instead cause energy companies to increase their costs, which would be passed downstream and ultimately borne by ordinary people. DiLorenzo agreed with the qualification, saying the energy companies cannot pass on those costs indefinitely. He recounted that when the Biden administration first came in, the energy secretary appeared on a television news show and, asked what the administration could do to bring down the price of gasoline, laughed and giggled uncontrollably. DiLorenzo said he knew what she was thinking: that they had just vetoed the Keystone Pipeline from Canada, were talking about banning offshore drilling and eliminating drilling on government lands, and wanted gasoline prices to be $100 a gallon to force people into electric cars. He illustrated the limits of cost pass-through with the example of Turkey, where at the time of a visit the price of gas was the equivalent of $18 a gallon and a young man with an MBA drove a scooter because he could not afford a car, given 100% taxes on automobiles. Lies, Damned Lies & the Inflation Reduction Act (2022)
Armed IRS agents and the history of tax resistance
Asked what other elements of the act enraged him, DiLorenzo said the most atrocious thing was the plan to hire 87,000 new IRS agents, reportedly 70,000 of them to be armed. He invoked the Declaration of Independence, saying Jefferson wrote that this train of abuses by King George III included sending swarms of officers into homes to eat out the substance of the people, and that these were armed tax collectors who barged into homes with guns to enforce the Stamp Tax and other taxes. He said Americans got rid of that by fighting a revolution. Lies, Damned Lies & the Inflation Reduction Act (2022)
DiLorenzo then recounted that after the revolution Alexander Hamilton wanted to bring that back, and that a Whiskey Tax rebellion followed in which Western Pennsylvania farmers protested, refused to pay, and tarred and feathered federal tax collectors. He said Hamilton talked George Washington into taking some 13,000 soldiers into Western Pennsylvania to try to enforce the Whiskey Tax, that it turned into a bust, that Washington went home, and that two protesters were convicted of tax evasion but were pardoned by Washington. DiLorenzo called the proposal to bring back armed tax collectors the same thing the American Revolution was fought against, and said the income tax and the IRS need to be abolished altogether and not given guns at our expense. Lies, Damned Lies & the Inflation Reduction Act (2022)
Regulatory socialism and the future of the economy
Zadek asked DiLorenzo how life in the country would be altered once the act kicked in, and whether the economy was simply too big for the law to have noticeable adverse effects. DiLorenzo said one thing that could conceivably happen is that Republicans could gain control of Congress and defund the act, though he was not optimistic. He quoted the late socialist economist Robert Heilbroner, who wrote a 1990 article in the Atlantic magazine that DiLorenzo described as a mea culpa, saying the intellectual battle between capitalism and socialism is over and capitalism has won, but adding that there was still hope for fellow socialists: socialism could be achieved through government regulation in the name of saving the planet, going in the back door. DiLorenzo called this regulatory socialism and said a big part of the so-called Inflation Reduction Act does exactly that by piling on thousands of additional environmental regulations, from what kind of windows you put in your home or business office to more taxes on energy. Lies, Damned Lies & the Inflation Reduction Act (2022)
Zadek closed the discussion by returning to the question of cost, saying that if you take all the resources of the country and apply them to one singular goal, you will probably accomplish the goal and leave behind a country in shambles, and that this is nothing other than a war. Lies, Damned Lies & the Inflation Reduction Act (2022)
The IRS hiring spree and the $600 reporting rule
A January 2023 episode returned to the act’s IRS provisions. Zadek noted that the Biden legislation allocates 80 billion, that the legislation had been signed, and that Republicans in the House, which controls the purse, have the power to appropriate the money budgeted for the IRS and to direct how the IRS may and may not spend the $80 billion. He said there is hope even though the legislation has already been enacted. What the IRS’s Hiring Spree Means for You (2023)
Zadek also raised what he called an underreported bit of legislation requiring anybody being paid more than $600 a year through cash apps such as Venmo to report, and requiring Venmo to report. He asked whether the IRS might use those reports to assess taxes against those people, and which segment of the population—the under $400,000 crowd or the over $400,000 crowd—was more likely to be paid through Venmo, doubting that Warren Buffett or Donald Trump received substantial income through a Venmo account. What the IRS’s Hiring Spree Means for You (2023)
At the close of the episode, Zadek thanked guest Ashley Varner of the Freedom Foundation for sharing her thoughts on what he called this really ugly piece or portion of the Inflation Reduction Act, inaptly named, and for the Foundation’s work helping level the playing field. What the IRS’s Hiring Spree Means for You (2023)
Housing funds and local reform
In a February 2023 episode on housing and construction, Zadek mentioned that Biden’s obscene $1.7 trillion whatever it was called Inflation Reduction Act had a little bit of funds to localities which induce legislation or create legislation to provide for more housing. He offered this in the context of describing state-level reforms in California that limit traditional local control zoning, with states offering both a carrot and a stick. Free to Build (2023)
Zadek also noted that the Wall Street Journal had reported, he thought just the other day, on the early stages of a national rent control statute, which he called the scary other way to go. Guest Christian Britschgi of Reason said he had just written about the federal rent control proposals that Zadek mentioned. Free to Build (2023)
Across episodes
The September 2022 episode with Thomas DiLorenzo and the January 2023 episode with Ashley Varner both address the act’s IRS provisions, but the later treatment shifts from DiLorenzo’s historical framing of armed tax collectors back to the American Revolution toward a narrower focus on congressional appropriations power over the $80 billion and on the $600 cash-app reporting requirement. The February 2023 episode with Christian Britschgi adds a housing dimension not present in the earlier discussions, noting the act’s funds to localities for housing-related legislation. The excerpts show no development in the underlying characterization of the act as misnamed; that framing is consistent across the episodes.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state the act’s formal public law number, its vote margins, its total dollar cost, or the specific statutory text of any provision. They do not identify the Democratic congresswoman DiLorenzo cites, the Biden administration energy secretary by name, or the title of Robert Heilbroner’s 1990 Atlantic article. The excerpts also do not describe any court challenge to the act or any amendment turned on in litigation over it.