Schumer says Inflation Reduction Act will bring major investments, jobs to north country

Aug. 9—After the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act in the Senate, Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., is highlighting how the new legislation could improve life for the north country.

The legislation, which addresses dozens of major priorities for Democrats, expanding clean energy investments, allowing for lower costs of prescription drugs, raising corporate taxes and cutting down the federal deficit, passed the Senate after a party-line vote Sunday.

In an interview Monday afternoon, Sen. Schumer said he sees this bill as the most significant piece of legislation passed by Congress in decades.

"When I negotiated this bill, I thought of people in the north country and upstate New York in general" he said. "Families who struggle to pay the bills, so many hundreds of thousands of our citizens who have diabetes, particularly elderly people, and can't afford it, and our beautiful environments, the Adirondack Mountains, the St. Lawrence, and how global warming would affect them."

In the north country, much of the IRA's investments in clean energy and efficient appliances will help people by cutting electric bills by an estimated $1,000 annually per-person by 2030. Tax rebates for the purchase of clean, efficient electric appliances will also help cut electricity costs.

In the town of Hounsfield, the planned Convalt Energy solar panel manufacturing plant will get a "shot in the arm" from the IRA's clean energy investments, Sen. Schumer said.

"It will ensure that you can compete with the heavily subsidized Chinese manufacturers," he said.

Novabus, a transit bus manufacturer with a location in Plattsburgh, will also be put in line for grants and subsidies for its electric, compressed natural gas and hybrid bus manufacturing.

Hydroelectric power generation will also see investments, alongside solar and wind power, and property owners who transition to electric heating will see tax credits to help cover the costs of the transition.

The senator said another piece of legislation recently passed, the CHIPS Act that invests billions in semiconductor and computer chip manufacturing, will dovetail the IRA to bring even more economic development to the north country.

"It's going to really boost research institutions like Clarkson," he said.

Chip manufacturers are being courted to open facilities in Syracuse and near Utica, and investments are planned for the Corning optical manufacturing facility in Canton, which supports semiconductor manufacturing with optical measurement systems.

For the wider swath of upstate New York, Sen. Schumer said the automotive industry will see a boost for electric vehicles, public and private research universities across the state will see more funds for clean energy research, and the thousands of New Yorkers with Medicare will see the costs of their perception medications drop.

"There's going to be billions in clean energy tax credits, it's going to help auto manufacturing in places like Tonawanda and Lockport," Sen. Schumer said. "Battery companies in Binghamton are going to get help. In the Capital Region, green hydrogen company Plug Power, which set up a new factory in the Finger Lakes, and $20 million in loans to help build clean vehicle manufacturing in New York."

The bill includes much of what Democrats had included in the now-dead Build Back Better plan, which called for trillions in spending and failed to gain support from conservative Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin, West Virginia, and Kyrsten L. Sinema, Arizona. Much of what made the BBB plan so expensive was stripped from the IRA, taking the bills expenditures down to about $370 billion over 10 years and raising revenue by instituting a new 15% tax on corporations that make over $1 billion a year, capping the price Medicare patients can be charged for insulin to $35 per vial, and investing billions in the Internal Revenue Service's tax collection arm.

The bill, with its lower price tag, also cuts back on some Democratic priorities. Only Medicare patients will see their insulin costs capped, while privately insured patients, including those with health care through the Affordable Care Act exchanges, will not. Expansions in child care subsidies and training programs, and the permanent institution of the Child Tax Credit, were scrapped from the bill, and some planned corporate taxes were also cut out.

"Not everyone got what they wanted, and there were things that many of us would have liked to put in the bill that we didn't have 50 votes for, but the fact is that we pulled together and got something so major done is going to make a huge difference to the American people, both in terms of the specifics, but also because finally Congress got off its butt and did something real," Sen. Schumer said.

The IRA now moves on to the Democratically controlled House for passage there. If it passes the House, the bill will go to the desk of President Joseph R. Biden, who has pledged to sign it as soon as possible.