Joe Manchin Rescues the Democrats

[Fun CH]

He's looking after his self interests and all legal, but troublesome.

https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/joe-manch ... t-n1285934


"Manchin has a lucrative family business that sells waste coal to a power plant in West Virginia that “emits air pollution at a higher rate than any other plant in the state,” according to the Post.

Under the former clean electricity provision in the Build Back Better bill, that business could’ve been hurt. Manchin played a decisive role in killing it, despite explanations from policymakers and experts that it would have lowered energy costs and created thousands of jobs in his state."

[PAL]

Agree, Chris, the income level should be modified and as you say for under the poverty line.
So, maybe the Dems can look at that, but Joe still wouldn't vote for it, I bet.
The good for the children outweighs the fraud. $300 is nothing compared to what Manchin makes, who also gets free health care and all the benefits his job allows. Now if he would really do his job and represent the people.
Well, Alf, people will vote against their own self interests. It's called ignorance.
Joe Manchin honestly is a Republican.

[mister_coffee]

One of the repeated blind spots of our elected officials is misunderstand free-rider problems.

Any economic system or any government program is going to have a free rider problem of some sort. You obviously have to make tradeoffs with a benefit program between protecting against fraud and ensuring that everyone who is eligible for the program will be able to access it. You are unlikely to be able to do both 100 percent of the time.

Neither side of the political debate is able to make a rational argument for what those tradeoffs (between allowing people access to a government benefit and protecting against fraud) should be and where the lines ought to be.

And it isn't always conservatives arguing about protecting against fraud and liberals always arguing for access to a government benefit. The story is often flipped when it comes to tax breaks for certain industries and deregulation of certain industries.

[pasayten]

Sen. Joe Manchin told colleagues he believed parents would use child tax credits to buy drugs and people would abuse paid leave to go hunting, report says

gpanetta@businessinsider.com (Grace Panetta,Joseph Zeballos-Roig) - 8h ago

Joe Manchin told colleagues he believed Americans would abuse benefits in Biden's spending package.
Manchin said he thought parents would use child tax credit funds to buy drugs, HuffPost reported.
The West Virginia senator killed any chance of the bill passing in its current form.
Sen. Joe Manchin privately told his Senate colleagues that he believed Americans would abuse government benefits, like the extended child tax credit and paid leave, in President Joe Biden's sweeping $2 trillion spending package, HuffPost reported.

Specifically, Manchin said parents would use child-tax-credit money to buy drugs and workers would abuse the paid-family-leave program in the legislation to get out of work and go on hunting trips, unnamed people familiar with his remarks told HuffPost.

A person familiar with the situation told Insider Manchin privately expressed concern about grandparents taking care of children whose parents struggle with addiction. He said he worried about the caretakers not being able to qualify for the child-tax-credit money themselves. The West Virginia Democrat advocated for a way to ensure the federal aid flowed to them instead.

On Monday, he publicly reiterated his worry about grandparents being unable to access the payments on "Talkline with Hoppy Kercheval," a West Virginia radio program.

"We have children that are now living with grandparents, and really to the assistance that we give to the welfare system, don't you think we can basically target that child?" he said. "Make sure the money follows the child so if a grandparent's raising the child, they're getting the money and not the parent — even though they're biological parents who are not capable or not having the desire to raise that child."

The US Senate left town early Saturday morning without voting on the nearly $2 trillion spending package, known as the Build Back Better agenda, after unsuccessful negotiations between the White House and Manchin over the bill. And the West Virginia Democrat, a key swing vote in a Senate evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans, killed any chance of the legislation passing the US Senate in its current form on Sunday.

"If I can't go home and explain it to the people of West Virginia, I can't vote for it," Manchin told Fox News in a Sunday interview. "I've tried everything humanly possible. I can't get there. This is a no."


In a subsequent statement, Manchin said he was concerned about the bill adding to the national debt, worsening inflation, and reducing the US's reliance on fossil fuels and coal "faster than technology or the markets allow."

"My Democratic colleagues in Washington are determined to dramatically reshape our society in a way that leaves our country even more vulnerable to the threats we face," Manchin said. "I cannot take that risk with a staggering debt of more than $29 trillion and inflation taxes that are real and harmful to every hard-working American at the gasoline pumps, grocery stores and utility bills with no end in sight."

The version of the sweeping legislation passed by the US House included an extension of the child tax credit, four weeks of paid family leave, and universal prekindergarten. The bill also focused on healthcare measures, including drug-pricing reforms, support for the Affordable Care Act, and additional coverage of hearing benefits in Medicare. And it allocated hundreds of billions of dollars toward measures to combat the climate emergency.

The US is the only developed nation and one of a few countries worldwide with no national program for paid family and medical leave. Manchin has previously sought to add work requirements to the child tax credit and expressed opposition to passing paid leave. Specifically, he said he was worried that the bill wouldn't fully pay for a paid-leave program and pushed for it to be funded with a new payroll tax on workers and employers.

The notion that low-income Americans wouldn't be responsible with money from government benefits has spurred numerous, mostly Republican-controlled, states to require drug testing for recipients of food stamps or Temporary Assistance for Needy Families benefits and impose work requirements on Medicaid recipients.

Other Democratic senators were "shocked" by Manchin's comments and saw them as an "unfair assault" on those living in poverty, HuffPost reported.

"Senator Manchin has made clear he supports the child tax credit and believes the money should be targeted to those who need it most," Sam Runyon, a spokesperson for Manchin, told Insider. "He has also expressed support for a paid leave program that has a dedicated, sustainable funding mechanism."

The Senate enacted the current beefed-up child tax credit in the American Rescue Plan, which Democrats passed along party lines in March. The measure increased the maximum amount parents could receive from $2,000 a year to $3,600, depending on the age of the child, regardless of whether the parents earned enough to file tax returns. Over 36 million households have taken advantage of the tax credit since payments started going out in July.

The expanded child tax credit in the Build Back Better agenda would have allowed parents who earn below a certain income to receive monthly payments of $300 per child under 6 and $250 for children between 6 and 18 for another year. Without congressional action, the expanded child tax credit will expire at the end of 2021.

As HuffPost noted, there is little evidence that the enhanced benefits are being used to purchase drugs. A US Census Pulse survey from October found that 58% of recipients said they used the money for food, 33% said they used the funds for utilities, and 30% said they put the money toward school transportation and buying clothes.

Researchers found that the expanded child tax credit had already significantly reduced both child poverty and child hunger and had the potential to lift even more children out of poverty if extended.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets ... ar-AARZKdS

[Fun CH]

Manchin says no to the continued $300/child direct monthly payment, which has cut childhood poverty,

here is a quote on who is qualified to receive that payment. So a married couple making $150,000 (MAGI)a year needs that money?

Perhaps only pay the people that actually need the help under with income under the poverty line, and not people who need to offset the costs of a vacation to Disney land. Then your point would valid.

"You can take full advantage of the credit only if your modified adjusted gross income is:

Single: under $75,000.

Head of household: $112,500.

Married filing jointly: $150,000"

[PAL]

But consider this: "Manchin indicates his worry about the deficit after voting just this week for a military budget of $778 billion, four times greater than BBB over ten years and $25 billion more than the president requested."
Manchin says no to the continued $300/child direct monthly payment, which has cut childhood poverty, Medicare to cover dental, hearing and eyeglasses.
He isn't prepared to demand that millionaires and large corporations start paying their fair share of taxes.
The Republicans love to scare millions of people by saying, your taxes will increase. What they don't say is that the admin. only wanted to increase taxes on those making over $400,000.
Heck, I know I don't have any friends here in the Valley that make that. There are some businesses that probably do. Very few.
It would be patriotic for the corps and the wealthy to pay their share.

[pasayten]

Joe Manchin Rescues the Democrats
His opposition to Build Back Better gives Biden a chance to change course.

By The WSJ Editorial Board
Dec. 19, 2021 6:01 pm ET

Joe Manchin’s decision on Sunday to oppose the Build Back Better Act is a service to the country, sparing it from huge tax increases and new entitlements that would fan inflation and erode the incentive for Americans to work. Paradoxically, it is also a blessing for Democrats if they get the message, and it offers President Biden a chance to reboot.

“My Democratic colleagues in Washington are determined to dramatically reshape our society in a way that leaves our country more vulnerable to the threats we face,” the West Virginia Democrat said in a statement after announcing his opposition on Fox News Sunday. “I cannot take that risk with a staggering debt of more than $29 trillion and inflation taxes that are real and harmful to every hard-working American at the gasoline pumps, grocery stores and utility bills with no end in sight.”

He’s right on every point. He also referred to “geopolitical uncertainty,” especially regarding China and Russia, noting that passing the bill would make it harder for the U.S. to respond rapidly to “these pending threats.” This is a wise warning that the U.S. cannot finance both a runaway entitlement state and an adequate national defense in a dangerous world.

All of this brought the predictable consternation from progressives, with a furious Bernie Sanders denouncing Mr. Manchin and promising retribution in West Virginia. It’s a hollow threat. West Virginians opposed the BBB bill by about 3 to 1 in a recent poll.

Mr. Sanders demanded an up-or-down vote on the Senate floor, and Mr. Manchin said he’s fine with that. As we’ve written, bring it on, and make Senate Democrats running for re-election in 2022 vote on it. Don’t be surprised if such a vote never happens.

The same media that cheered Mr. Biden’s entitlement ambitions as the second coming of FDR are now blaming Mr. Manchin for hurting his party. But where were they when we warned that Mr. Biden and Democrats in Congress were offering a radical agenda that far exceeded the mandate of their narrow victories in 2020 and the grasp of a 50-50 Senate? The media’s progressive bias again misled Democrats into thinking they would carry the day.

Chuck Schumer, the Senate Majority Leader, refused to take Mr. Manchin’s red lines seriously when the West Virginian wrote them in the summer. Mr. Schumer kept looking over his shoulder at a potential primary challenge in 2022 from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Now we’ll see if AOC challenges him anyway as he tries to pick up the pieces.

As for the House, Speaker Nancy Pelosi had her Members vote to pass tax increases and $5 trillion in spending that will not become law. She had promised her swing-district Members she wouldn’t do that as she did when they voted for a climate bill that failed in 2010. Then she did it anyway.

Reps. Josh Gothheimer (New Jersey), Henry Cuellar (Texas) and many others will now have to defend a bill that Republicans can accurately say was too radical to pass. This is Mrs. Pelosi’s fault, not that of Mr. Manchin, who was honest about his objections from the start.

We have to admit that Mr. Manchin’s defection also vindicates Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s strategy to support an infrastructure bill that showed bipartisan Senate deal-making is possible. We don’t apologize for opposing that bill on the merits; it contains hundreds of billions of dollars in wasted spending. But Mr. McConnell calculated that sometimes you have to sacrifice a piece to win the chess match, and the GOP leader read the West Virginian well.

The silver lining for Democrats is that this gives them a chance to face political reality before they leap off a cliff. The Democratic left must now confront the limits of their power. Mr. Sanders and Elizabeth Warren thought they could bully their agenda through a 50-50 Senate, though they had both lost to Mr. Biden in the 2020 primaries. Their failure to narrow their ambitions doomed the bill.

Yet they somehow persuaded Mr. Biden that he had to govern from the left, in what has proven to be a catastrophic misjudgment. Someday we will learn why Mr. Biden made that decision, though perhaps it is as simple as the fact that throughout his career he has followed his party rather than lead it.

White House chief of staff Ron Klain and domestic policy adviser Susan Rice, the lead architects of this misjudgment, should tender their resignations so Mr. Biden can get advisers willing to govern from the middle. He can start by focusing on the main concerns of voters: coping with Covid-19, reducing inflation, and at least trying to do something to restore order at the border.

The response of many readers will be that this is impossible since Mr. Biden is too weak a leader to pull off such a course correction. Perhaps he is. (See the White House’s tone-deaf Sunday response nearby.) But we’re not about to cheer lead three more years of presidential failure. Mr. Manchin offers Democrats a lifeline back from the abyss.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/joe-manchi ... _headlines