Tag Archives: One Big Beautiful Bill

Realizing The Value Of People Who Know How To Fix Things

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On May 10, Trade School Secrets posted an article about a significant change in Pell Grants in the One Big Beautiful Bill.

The article reports:

For years, Pell Grants were locked inside the traditional college system.

No matter how outdated, expensive, or ineffective a 4-year degree became — they still got the funding.

Meanwhile, trade schools offering real skills in months instead of years?
Zero access to that same federal money.

Until now.

In a move that just changed the game, Congress approved the Bipartisan Workforce Pell Act, which expands Pell Grant eligibility to short-term workforce training programs. This means that students can now use Pell Grants for programs as short as 8 to 15 weeks, provided they meet certain quality and outcome standards.

Here’s what this means:

    • Students can now get up to $7,395 in free grant money (not a loan)
    • Trade school owners can now tap into millions in new funding streams
    • Programs as short as 8 to 15 weeks now qualify — no need for a 2-year degree
    • The biggest barrier to enrollment, cost is now eliminated for thousands of students

This isn’t theory. It’s policy.

And it’s going to send a tidal wave of enrollments through the doors of trade schools nationwide.

At a time when plumbers, electricians, auto mechanics, welders, and other skilled tradesmen and women are reaching retirement age, there are not enough young people trained or training in those professions to replace them. This will help solve that problem.

Putting The Blame Where It Belongs

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On Saturday, The Daily Caller posted an article about the problem of rising energy prices under President Trump. As the expression goes, “Rome wasn’t built in a day.” President Trump has been in office for less than six months, he is still dealing with the multi-dimensional mess he walked into.

The article reports:

The corporate media is suggesting that President Donald Trump and the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) are responsible for rising electricity prices rather than the aggressive green energy policies of Democrats and former President Joe Biden, who himself presided over a major spike in prices.

Several major corporate media outlets have linked Trump’s OBBBA to climbing energy prices, despite data from the Energy Information Administration (EIA) showing that electricity bills were already on the rise, shooting up during the middle of the Biden administration. Energy experts, grid watchdogs and operators have long warned that the Biden-era green energy push threatens grid security and drives up electricity costs, as power demand also surges from the booming artificial intelligence (AI) sector.

“Electricity prices have been increasing since the grid became burdened with unreliable and expensive wind and solar. The problem has recently worsened as electricity demand has increased because of the explosion in AI-driven data center energy needs that wind and solar just can’t meet,” Steve Milloy, senior policy fellow at the Energy and Environment Legal Institute, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Demand will likely continue to increase and will only be satisfied by more fossil fuel and nuclear baseload power. The BBB will make more baseload power possible by discouraging utilities from adding more unreliable and pointlessly expensive wind and solar.”

The article concludes:

“Democrats committed arson on electricity prices and now they have the nerve to accuse Trump of playing with matches. In Trump’s first term, electricity prices rose by less than 1% per year. Under Biden, electricity prices rose 22%. I think the American people will trust President Trump’s energy policies more than hypocritical Democrat finger-pointing,” James Taylor, president of The Heartland Institute and the founding director of Heartland’s Arthur B. Robinson Center for Climate and Environmental Policy, told the DCNF.

The Department of Energy (DOE) warned in its July 7 report that blackouts could increase by a factor of 100 by 2030 if the U.S. keeps retiring power plants without adequate replacements, the grid will be unable to meet the soaring demand from energy-hungry data centers in the coming years. It continued to single out wind and solar as key contributors to declining grid stability and argued that dispatchable generation from sources like coal, oil, gas and nuclear are vital to meet American power needs.

Like it or not, the economy and infrastructure of the globe runs on fossil fuel. Until the free market invents something considerably more reliable and ecologically sound from start to finish, our reliance on fossil fuel will continue. Wind and solar at this time are simply not practical.

Let’s Go Back To Real Cars With Real Engines!

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On Friday, Issues & Insights posted an article about an item in the Big Beautiful Bill that was not highly publicized.

The article reports:

One of the most important provisions in the One Big Beautiful Bill has gone completely unnoticed, but promises to make the auto industry great again.

For 50 years, the federal government has been forcing fuel economy standards on auto companies. If the average fuel economy of the cars sold in a year exceeded a federal standard, the companies had to cough up enormous penalties.

Passed in 1975 as a way to deal with an energy crisis (that was caused by government price controls), “corporate average fuel economy” (CAFE) standards – required the fleet of cars sold by an automaker to achieve an arbitrary miles-per-gallon goal. If they missed the goal, they paid hefty annual fines.

From the beginning, these standards were a disaster, forcing automakers to radically downsize their fleet, which research showed cost thousands of lives because, all things being equal, smaller, lighter cars are less safe than larger ones.

In fact, a 2002 National Academy of Sciences found that these fuel economy standards not only boosted the cost of cars, but may have caused as many as 2,600 more traffic fatalities just in 1993.

The article notes:

In this first term, Trump rolled the standard back a bit, only to have Joe Biden come in and impose standards specifically designed to force most cars sold to be electric. The standards would have cost automakers billions in fines for failing to meet the fuel-economy targets.

This time around, Trump is again planning to roll the CAFE standards back. But Congress did him one better. Rather than wait for regulators to rewrite the rule, which can take years and be subject be endless lobbying and litigation from various interest groups – lawmakers simply zeroed out the penalty as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill.

Now, if a car company sells cars that, on average, exceed whatever the fuel-economy limit is technically in force in a given year, they pay… nothing. The mandate is still in place, but the penalty is now $0.00. (Republicans pulled off the same trick with the dreaded Obamacare insurance mandate — zeroing out the penalty rather than trying to get the mandate repealed.)

Hopefully this will be the end of the electric Ford Mustang where they have to manufacture the engine growl electronically and the beginning of going back to the real Mustang design with the real growl!