Mike Rowe: America will take 'another pie to the face' if Biden's Inflation Reduction Act doesn't reduce inflation

Former "Dirty Jobs" host Mike Rowe criticized the rhetoric used by Democrats to describe their multi-billion dollar climate spending and tax bill, dubbed the "Inflation Reduction Act," saying Americans will see past the bill title and judge it based on whether it improves the economy.

"Can we have bills that actually do what they say in their title?" Rowe asked on "Fox & Friends" Tuesday morning.

He continued, "Now, if the Inflation Reduction Act truly reduces inflation, then we can start with a conversation about the nuts and bolts of the bill. But we've come to the point where nothing actually means what it says. And that gets us into an emperor's new clothes kind of mentality, where it's not one kid in the crowd going, 'Hey, that guy's naked.' It's the whole country going, 'Wait. Again with this? Again with the name of a thing that doesn't seem to reflect the thing?' And so we got to peel back the layers and we have to look at it. And then we have to have the conversation: How does this impact the middle class?

"What the heck do I know? If it lives up to its name, it'll impact them in a positive way. If it doesn't, it's another pie in the face," Rowe said.

The Inflation Reduction Act has been lauded by Democrats as a historic investment in green energy to save the climate and in policies that will force the wealthy to "pay their fair share" in taxes and reduce the deficit to fight inflation. The bill imposes a 15% minimum tax on corporations with profits over $1 billion, spends about $80 billion to ramp up Internal Revenue Service enforcement, and spends more than $360 billion on tax credits and subsidies to boost the green energy industry.

However, some economists have warned that the Inflation Reduction Act will have a negligible impact on inflation. Analysis from the Tax Foundation estimates the bill will reduce long-run economic output by about 0.2% and eliminate 29,000 full-time jobs in the United States.

Fox News co-host Peter Doocy pointed out that while unemployment is at historically low levels, fewer Americans are participating in the economy now compared to before the pandemic, and people are still feeling squeezed by inflation.

"It's almost impossible to have a rational conversation about this because it just flies past people," Rowe lamented.

"Years ago, when I started Mike Rowe Works, the skills gap consisted of 2.3 million jobs. But the headlines every day were the number of people who were unemployed. That's what we were fixated on, 10 million people out of work. So it became impossible to talk about a few million open jobs. Today, you have 7.5 million open jobs and super-low unemployment," he said.

"And we still can't get it into our heads that the existence of all of that opportunity must mean something. It must say something about who we are as a people and what we're elevating in terms of work. And I'm afraid what it says is not really good."

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