The Biden Treasury Department issued its final rules on the new tax credit for developers who build “energy-efficient homes.” Some of the rules are not about energy efficiency but about electrification and solar panels, which means this law has all the normal flaws of green energy laws: It picks winners and losers and thus is certain to have counterproductive unintended consequences.

One inefficiency of this law is that it effectively requires developers who want the full subsidy to hire union labor. This provision helps demonstrate how Bidenomics works and why economic nationalists on the Right face a very hard obstacle that they have not really addressed. Specifically, industrial policy is inherently political, and it almost always undermines conservative politics.

THE SINGLE-DIGIT CANDIDATES ARE ONLY HELPING TRUMP

Democrats’ poorly named Inflation Reduction Act revived and expanded an expired tax credit for developers who build energy-efficient homes. The credit is called 45L, named after the provision of the tax bill that created it under President George W. Bush. Biden’s legislation increased the credit to $5,000, but only for developers who pay their workers the “prevailing wage.” In effect, this is a tax break for hiring union workers.

Here's how the New York Times’s Jonathan Weisman describes the politics of Biden’s gambit:

“Federal money is pouring into the growing industry, with thick strings attached to reward companies that pay union wages, employ union apprentices and buy American steel, iron and components."

I think that’s an incomplete and too innocent explanation. Yes, Biden hopes he can buy union votes with corporate welfare that requires union hires. But also, simply funneling money through big business to unionized workers helps the Democrats even if not a single worker is won over by the trickle-down tax credit. That’s because union bosses are uniformly partisan Democrats who will use all union dues to fund Democrats.

The PAC for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers spends more than 90% of its money to elect Democrats. So, a tax credit that only goes to developers who hire union workers is a tax credit that subsidizes the IBEW, which is a tax credit that subsidizes Democratic politicians. This is the heart of Bidenomics: Use the tax code and the federal budget to subsidize the Democratic Party.

Some Republicans and conservative policy types have been advocating pro-worker industrial policy — that is, they want Uncle Sam to use tax breaks, spending, mandates, and regulations to support high-paying jobs for working-class people. This is a fine idea in the abstract, but in actual policymaking, industrial policy becomes tangled up with politics.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

Biden, for example, uses industrial policy as a way to wage his culture war in favor of the two-income-plus-daycare model. Also, labor union bosses are partisan Democrats, and the prevailing philosophy on the political Left today is intersectionality, which means that every fight everywhere has to be about everything. The result: Labor unions are weighing in on issues such as abortion.

The sum of all of this is that any policy, like Biden’s prevailing wage green subsidy, aimed to boost union workers, ends up boosting Democratic politicians and the Left’s culture warriors. Unless the national conservatives could wrestle the unions away from the Democrats and the Left, they have a self-defeating agenda.