Democrats are looking for answers. They want to figure out why Vice President Kamala Harris lost so much ground to former (and future) President Donald Trump. To paraphrase President Kennedy, this defeat has 100 fathers. One of those fathers is certainly the Inflation Reduction Act.

The IRA was wrong from the start. It was rammed through Congress without a single Republican vote (Harris broke the tie in the Senate). It tried to reduce inflation by massively increasing government spending. Even the most dedicated Keynesian economist knows that government spending is inflationary. In fact, driving up prices is the goal of government spending.

Americans also know this. They watched as gas prices soared even as the administration poured billions into projects that were supposed to deliver clean energy. Instead, almost half the projects ended up being put on hold. However, the price tag for those and other IRA projects keeps increasing.

“The energy and climate provisions of the IRA are already burning through taxpayer dollars at rates much higher than initially projected,” the CATO Institute warned recently. “These subsidies will likely cost over $1 trillion by 2032 and as much as $4 trillion by 2050, and some of the most lucrative tax credits have no expiration date.”

As with energy, so with Medicare.

“The Inflation Reduction Act provides meaningful financial relief for millions of people with Medicare by improving access to affordable treatments,” the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services claims. But they are just following Biden administration orders. The facts don’t back up the assertion.

Don’t take my word for it. “The standard monthly premium for Medicare Part B enrollees will be $185.00 for 2025, an increase of $10.30 from $174.70 in 2024,” CMS writes elsewhere. “The annual deductible for all Medicare Part B beneficiaries will be $257 in 2025, an increase of $17 from the annual deductible of $240 in 2024.”

That increase is almost double the rate of inflation (how ironic!) and more than double the cost-of-living-adjustment for Social Security.

That is premiums. The IRA was also supposed to reduce the cost of prescription drugs. Instead, they keep going up. The act simply shifted responsibility for large claims from the government to private insurance companies, raising their costs substantially.

“Plans have responded to these higher operating costs by raising premiums or imposing coverage restrictions that make it harder for seniors to access the drugs they need,” writes economist Tomas J. Philipson. “Many health insurance companies have simply stopped offering Part D plans entirely.”

Even for those who can still get Plan D coverage, prices shot up. “Comparing identical plans, average monthly premiums spiked a staggering 21% in 2024,” Philipson adds in Fortune. “That’s an additional $96 per year, or roughly $2.2 billion in additional premium spending across all stand-alone Part D plan enrollees just this year.”

The Biden administration has failed to hold down Medicare prices, which seems like the least we can expect from a bill called the Inflation Reduction Act. Instead, faced with a possible jump of $5 billion in costs to consumers (prices), the administration boosted federal spending even more, pumping billions of dollars in subsidies out to insurance companies.

“Administration officials decided months ago to funnel money from a Medicare trust fund to offset rate increases that could have cost millions of people hundreds of dollars more a year,” the New York Times reported in September. The Times called that “a savvy response to the specter of huge spikes in costs.”

Spending billions to save thousands doesn’t sound all that “savvy” to me, but it sure does sound “inflationary.”

Someday, somebody will have to pay the bill for all this inflationary spending. It won’t be Joe Biden. It doesn’t need to be American taxpayers, either. The new Congress should repeal the entire Inflation Reduction Act as soon as it takes office in January. That would be a step back to fiscal sanity.

Rich Tucker is a writer and editor based in Richmond, Virginia. His work can be found at https://richardbriantucker.substack.com/.

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