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Joe Manchin's Symphony of Disingenuousness

He mumbles about inflation to try and stop a bill that's primarily
concerned with reducing inflation.

 

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) talks with reporters before a Senate Energy and
Natural Resources Committee hearing to examine U.S. infrastructure
needs, June 24, 2021, on Capitol Hill. (Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via AP
Images)

 

****

**** Let's say I didn't know anything about the big budget
reconciliation bill working its way through Congress this month.
(Believe me, I'd love to say that; things would be much easier if I
didn't.) If non-aware me read through the entirety of Joe Manchin's
op-ed

in Friday's

**Wall Street Journal**,

****which said that the bill is too expensive and just not right at this
time, I wouldn't know anything more about it. While Manchin ably
demonstrates how a conservative Democrat representing a red state can
preen about concepts like inflation and the deficit and spending
trillions of dollars, he explains nothing about what the bill he opposes
actually does, whom it would help, and what specific parts he disfavors.

Evidently, Manchin doesn't want you to know too much about the bill
he's trying to kill. Or at least, he doesn't want you to know why he
doesn't like it. Because if Manchin were truly concerned that we've
let costs for working families run out of control and we must avoid
passing a terrible future on to the next generation, he would be the
first in line to pass the reconciliation bill.

About the only thing Manchin lets on in his op-ed is that the
reconciliation bill would spend $3.5 trillion. (In reality it doesn't,
because there are offsetting tax increases and budget savings, but
let's put that aside for a second.) But if you boil it all down, the
bill has two main goals. The first aligns perfectly with Manchin's
aims of controlling inflation.

More than half of the reconciliation bill attempts to take the biggest
drivers of the increase in cost of living in American life over the past
40 years-health care, education, and housing-and bring those costs
down for working families. These costs in particular have been the
greatest hurdle to upward mobility and a sustainable middle-class
lifestyle. The bill is singularly oriented toward reducing those costs.

It tries to do this at every stage of the life cycle. It gives subsidies
to make child care affordable and establishes universal
pre-kindergarten. It makes community colleges tuition-free, thereby
creating a public option to cost-prohibitive higher education. It seeks
to build two million new housing units, and also lower housing costs
through a wide range of programs, from zoning reform to community land
trusts. It subsidizes insurance premiums for Obamacare recipients on the
exchanges, and converts unpaid family and medical leave to paid, so
workers can afford to experience a pregnancy or the care of a parent.
For seniors, it cuts costs by expanding Medicare to encompass dental,
vision, and hearing, and it negotiates prices on prescription drugs to
bring down those costs. And it subsidizes home and community-based
services to drastically reduce the cost of living in place at the end of
life.

**Read all of our infrastructure coverage here**

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I won't even go into the various tax breaks and program expansions for
working families in the bill, from a bulked-up child nutrition program
to extensions of the enhanced Child Tax Credit and Earned Income Tax
Credit. But the goal of those programs is to lift families out of
poverty and make their budgets more manageable.

The health, education, and housing parts comprise an enormous chunk of
the bill, and they're all quite disinflationary
.
It's not just that the bill's spending goes over a ten-year time
horizon and has offsets and therefore is not in the same category as,
say, the short-term stimulus of the American Rescue Plan. It's that it
aims to make living in America more financially sustainable, by
attacking the biggest costs people face.

Therefore it's completely misleading to object to moving forward
because of short-term inflationary pressures that have already begun to
decelerate. Manchin is just not being straight about this aspect of the
package.

The other major piece of the reconciliation bill concerns climate
measures, and there at least Manchin has a somewhat straightforward
argument. He represents a state that mines a lot of coal (or really used
to mine coal; there are only around 4,400 mining workers
in West Virginia today,
about 0.67 percent of the total workforce). He once shot a replica of a
climate bill in an ad he ran while running for office. He doesn't want
any climate mitigation policies that disrupt the extraction of fossil
fuels.

Of course, this isn't his argument. He's talking about deficits and
debt. But the cost of inaction, in terms of disaster cleanup and
recovery and displacement and resilience, is

**far** greater than the cost of acting now on climate. In Joe
Manchin's Washington, you're not allowed to talk about any crisis
other than the national debt, but the climate catastrophe before us
dwarfs the impact of what it might take to finance government activity.
Manchin's argument is we can't spend now because there may be a
future crisis; the future is now. Just ask the people diving into the
canal

that used to be the Vine Street Expressway in Philadelphia.

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But I don't suspect that's the real reason Manchin is irked by the
reconciliation bill. He could always negotiate internally on climate
rules and get the assurances he needs to proceed. Manchin's real
problem is that he wants to make the bill

**more** inflationary, in the name of preventing inflation.

That's because the bill pairs spending initiatives with tax reform,
aimed at rolling back some of the Trump tax cuts and increasing taxes on
corporations and the wealthy. We don't know how many tax increases
will be in there-Manchin and his ideological allies inside and outside
Congress are resisting those to the degree that the party is considering
some level of deficit spending
-but
it's a pillar of the legislation. Other savings come from Medicare
negotiation with prescription drug companies, which has led to pharma
companies enlisting building trades union allies

in their opposition.

The thing about these tax reforms and drug price reductions is that they
are extremely popular. Adding tax increases makes the various
infrastructure bills under consideration more popular
,
in fact. Manchin and his Republican colleagues made sure that the
bipartisan infrastructure bill had no tax changes of any kind. He's
been murmuring about trimming tax reform

for months. But now he doesn't want to make a frontal assault on
behalf of the rich people and corporate executives who fund political
campaigns. So he talks about deficits and inflation, which have no real
application to this legislation, to hide the ball on his real goal.

President Biden's American Jobs and Families Plans, which include all
the elements in the proposed reconciliation bill, are even popular in
West Virginia. In May, Data for Progress found both favored

by double digits, despite Biden's unpopularity in the state. Manchin
doesn't want to actually come out against an unpopular policy in his
own state. Instead, he leashes his opposition to some garbled nonsense
about inflation, when in fact, this is an inflation-fighting bill. He
doesn't want people to know that he's trying to prevent his rich
pals from having to chip in to allow middle-class families to better
keep up with the cost of living.

To read more about infrastructure and the Build Back Better Act, check
out our series Building Back America
.

 

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