The dark lord of hypocrisy, aka "Mr. President" Joe Manchin, rear-ended Joe Biden on MurdochVision over the weekend, saying he was a "No" on 3B after months of negotiations with progressives in Congress. They must feel like they have been mugged, having voted for the bipartisan hard infrastructure bill without a guarantee from him that he would support social spending. The fact is that his constituents would benefit enormously from 3B. The per capita income in West Virginia is a paltry $26,480, with 15.8% of the population living below the federal poverty level says the 2020 Census. Under 3B a West Virginia family with two kids would save nearly $10,000 per year on health and child care. The Treasury Department delivered payments last week benefitting three hundred and five thousand children in West Virginia. Statewide, ninety-three per cent of children are eligible for this tax credit, tied for the highest rate in the country. Analysts estimate that, if the program is allowed to expire, at the end of the month, fifty thousand children there will be in danger of falling into poverty. The average payment per family: four hundred and forty-six dollars a month.
But these embarrassing facts do not concern a rich, conservative coal baron who drives a Maserati. The only "mentality of entitlement" that Manchin should consider in policy deliberations is his own. One budget that does concern him is defense spending. He voted for the recent ADA bill that exceeded the administration's request by $25 billion. This chart shows the insane imbalance between expenditures for the unaccountable war machine and those proposed for a tattered social safety net:
It is time for working people in West Virginia to assert themselves and tell Manchin they want him to vote for 3B. Seventeen economic Nobel laureates are not wrong when they say it will not make inflation worse. Even Goldman Sachs says the bill would be good for the economy going forward. The bank slashed its 1Q economic projections for 2022 on news that the Judas Senator blocked Build Back Better this year. His favored policy analyst, Penn-Wharton, says the inflationary effect over time is minimal. In other words his rationale for opposition is "bullshit".