"Please, sir, I want some more."
According to the Washington Post, Manchin’s proposal presented to the White House last week was a $1.8 trillion package that included universal prekindergarten for 10 years, an expansion of Obamacare, and hundreds of billions of dollars to combat climate change. According to the WaPo story:
Manchin’s counteroffer, for instance, included funding universal pre-k for 10 years, rather than partially financing the measure for a few years. Manchin has long been public about his support of prekindergarten education.
On climate change, Manchin backed supporting a scaled-back version of what Democrats had sought — between $500 billion and $600 billion.
Missing was any extension of the Child Tax Credit.
But Manchin’s counteroffer excluded an extension of the expanded Child Tax Credit the administration has seen as a cornerstone of President Biden’s economic legacy, the people said, an omission difficult for the White House to accept in the high-stakes negotiations. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the closed-door deliberations.
This matches up with the report this morning that Manchin was against giving parents extra money because, in his mind, they’d just spend it all on drugs.
There is no mention of whether Manchin has expressly withdrawn his counteroffer. He definitely withdrew it by implication with his “announcement” on Fox this weekend.
It’s a conundrum to me whether the Democrats could accept any counteroffer (assuming it’s still on the table) that doesn’t include the Child Tax Credit. On the one hand, the expansion of Obamacare alone; if it included coverage for the millions of folks in those states that refused Medicaid expansion, would be life-saving to many Americans. On the other hand, throwing millions of children back into poverty seems unthinkable (except to soulless politicians like Manchin).
By the way, the comments on this story speculate that this “leak” could have come from Manchin’s office so take it with a grain of salt. For than matter, we need to be skeptical of anything Manchin says or does.
