Beginning this Thursday 16 September 2021, I will be urging the Democratic Party to expel Sen. Joe Manchin unless the Senate passes the pending voting rights acts. It’s come to this because Manchin is trying to end democracy.
The vast majority of Americans believe in democracy. Likely, this is because democracy is just the right way to run a country—fair, promoting the public welfare, morally correct—and most people know intuitively that a country without democracy is going to be a horrific place to live.
So, when we see someone like Manchin, who is standing in the way of voting rights for all citizens, there comes a time when he just needs to get out of politics.
Manchin is also damaging to the economic welfare of most people in this country. You can see that if you look closely at his response to questions by Dana Bash on CNN’s State of the Union today, 12 September 2021.
Manchin says he will not back the current reconciliation bill because he believes the nominal cost, $3.5 trillion over ten years, is too much. According to Manchin, this is a problem because of the national debt and potential inflation.
The problem with his argument is that the bill could be easily paid for by increasing taxes on the very, very rich. Last year, the wealth of billionaires (alone) increased almost a trillion dollars. There was no lack of money to pay for the Trump Administration. Congress passed deficits totally over $3.6 trillion—before covid hit—and probably in the neighborhood of $7 trillion if you include covid spending. The U.S. regularly spends around $800 billion a year ($8 trillion over ten years) for the military. Yet, Manchin thinks that less than half that is too much for domestic programs.
He also says that this spending will lead to inflation. This is a very naive position, considering we spent this much shoring up the Trump Administration, but it didn’t lead to inflation. Inflation can be handled by monetary policy, as the last several years have shown, as long as the economy continues to tick over at a good rate.
In any case, we don’t need to increase the money supply to spend this amount if we don’t borrow additional money to pay for the programs. We can easily do that by setting proper taxes on rich individuals and major corporations.
Manchin also complained that the proposal does not have competitive tax rates. By this, he means that taxes on corporations would be higher in the U.S. than in other countries.
There are a number of problems with this argument. First of all, corporations in the U.S. have major tax loopholes that lower the effective tax rate. Second, the U.S. should have higher tax rates than competing nations. For one thing, we spend around $800 billion a year on the military. It is the U.S. military that protects the sea and air lanes around the world, which is what allows these corporations to operate not just in the United States but in countries everywhere. If corporations are going to continue to benefit from this, they ought to pay for it. Other countries don’t pay to protect commerce the way the U.S. does.
Not only that, but the U.S. accounts for around a fifth of the world GDP. Corporations can’t just go elsewhere to operate. They need to operate in the U.S. because that’s where 20% of the business is. So, we can charge higher tax rates precisely because companies have to pay.
Manchin also complained that many people are benefiting from government programs who don’t need them because benefits are not means-tested. This is a silly argument because we have a progressive tax system that should—if it were working properly, and that’s something that really could be fixed—recover money from people who don’t need it. And means-testing adds a layer of cost and bureaucracy to these programs. “Means-testing” is just a distraction thrown up by people who don’t want to help the American public.
Manchin also complained about some aspects of the reconciliation bill. There are certainly parts of the bill I wouldn’t include, if I were dictator, but this has to pass through Congress. So, I expect it to have some items I don’t like. But if you step back and look at the package as a whole, it’s a good package that should be passed on the merits.
What are Manchin’s specific gripes about the bill? One of his major gripes is that it actually addresses climate change. He literally doesn’t agree we should have anything in the bill to address climate change.
One might say this is just old thinking from someone who represents a coal-producing state. But Manchin must be intelligent enough to know that coal cannot continue to be used as a power source. He himself notes that coal has gone from about 40% of the source of power generation to less than 15% over the last couple decades.
If he were concerned about coal miners in West Virginia he’d be looking for a part of the package to help them get out of the mines and into good-paying jobs in local manufacturing and renewable energy. But he’s opposed to fixing climate change generally.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez accused him of talking with Exxon every week, which he denies. But he doesn’t have to talk with them at all when his actions do the talking. If your actions help out Exxon-Mobil then it doesn’t matter if you talk strategy with them on the phone every week. You are still evil.
Because failing to address climate change will inevitably lead to death and destruction. We all know that. How do you justify slowing down the move to renewables when this year a literal hurricane went through your home state? (Technically, Ida was downgraded to a storm by the time it made it to West Virginia, but it still isn’t normal for remnants of hurricanes to sweep up the Alleghenies and kill people in the Northeast.)
Manchin used his statistics about the declining role of coal in the nation’s power grid to suggest the renewable industry doesn’t need federal help. That’s simply not true.
First, we are in an emergency situation with climate change. It’s starting to kill people in the U.S. on a regular basis. This is an all-of-government emergency. The current legislation doesn’t just need to provide subsidies for renewable energy production, it needs to eliminate subsidies for fossil fuels.
We spent trillions of dollars over the last several decades subsidizing fossil fuels. The entire war in Iraq that George W. Bush launched was about oil, and it alone cost us trillions of dollars. And now this miser wants to squash any spending to help dig us out of the climate hole the fossil fuel industry created.
It looks to me like Manchin is using the fact a lot of coal is mined in his state as cover to let him carry oil for the fossil fuel industry. He’s carrying oil, coal, natural gas, and other sources of destruction for our climate.
Dana Bash did eventually go beyond the issues of the reconciliation bill and infrastructure to ask Manchin about voting rights. His reply was to basically assert Democrats are being partisan.
Tell you what, Joe. Let’s play a game. You put $50 on the table and I’ll put $50 on the table. Then I’ll take 90 of those dollars and we can negotiate. Not fair, you say?
That’s what the Republicans did. They took 90% of voting rights away in the states. They did that in a very partisan manner. And now, we are negotiating at the federal level. My question is this: Why should we let them have any say in the results in Congress?
I also have a question for my fellow Democrats: Whose side are you on? Are you friends with Joe Manchin? Because, if you’re his friend, given what he’s doing, why? Why haven’t you already unfriended him?
I didn’t quote Manchin from State of the Union because I don’t want to help platform him any more than necessary. If someone thinks I’ve been unfair in my assessment of what he said on the program, please let me know.
In counterpoint, Dana Bash also interviewed Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Bash:
Chuck Schumer wants to have a draft of this reconciliation bill done by Wednesday, The House Speaker committed to holding a vote by September 27th. He [Manchin] said that’s not going to happen. Full stop. Are you willing to give it more time?
Sanders:
A few days here or there doesn’t matter. But there is a sense of urgency. …we live in a country today where the wealthiest people and the largest corporations are doing phenomenally well, while working-class people are struggling all over this country, in terms of healthcare—you have 90 million people uninsured or underinsured, people can’t afford to pay prescription drugs—can’t afford to send their kids to college, kids are leaving school deeply in debt. You’ve got almost 600,000 people in America who are homeless today. And you’ve got the climate crisis. You know, Oregon is burning. California is burning. Siberia is burning. People are dying in floods in New York City. Unprecedented rainfall. There is a sense of urgency, which I think the American people understand. And what they want is finally maybe, just maybe, the Congress of the United States will act for them, and not just for the wealthy campaign contributors and the rich and the powerful. Who, by the way, are pouring huge amounts of money—the drug companies, the insurance companies, fossil fuel industry—huge amounts of money to try to defeat us.
Bash:
Sen. Manchin said pretty explicitly he’s opposed to the clean energy provisions that you were going to put into this bill as you write it. …He doesn’t support raising the corporate tax rate as high as you want. … It’s a pretty deep disagreement about the fundamental priorities that you’ve been talking about. How do you bridge that?
Sanders:
…Not one Republican is prepared to help us take on the existential threat of climate change. Now, in terms of taxation. At a time when you have billionaires and large corporations in this country in some cases not paying a nickel in federal income tax, you know we should and can pay for this entire $3.5 trillion bill, which, by the way, extends over ten years, we should pay for it by demanding the wealthiest people, the largest corporations, in this country start paying their fair share of taxes. And if Mr. Manchin wants to pay for it [the reconciliation bill) completely, I am delighted, I know Sen. Wyden, chairman of the Finance Committee, I’m delighted to work with him, we can do that.
Dana Bash asked him how you get to a place where something can be done. Sanders reminded us that most of the Democrats (9 of 11) on the Budget Committee, and about 40 Senators generally, backed his $6 trillion plan and that they’ve already made a significant compromise in coming down to $3.5 trillion. He reminded us that the reconciliation bill and the infrastructure bill are tied together, and that many Democrats in the House will be unwilling to pass the final bill if it is too far off the $3.5 trillion already negotiated. He said we’re going to get this because “the American people are going to speak out on this issue.” Every single poll shows overwhelming support for this. (Meaning, that going against it could come back to haunt Republicans in the next elections.)
And we should speak out on this issue. It’s past time many of these problems were corrected. In fact, as I pointed out here, $3.5 trillion is not enough to address them. Congress responds to two things: money and votes. If they hear loudly from their constituents that they want something, it can be very difficult not to do it.
Sen. Manchin is wrong on this issue, too. We should not slow down the reconciliation bill. We should not cut its size. We’ve waited long enough to get a Congress willing to focus on problems that the American people are directly experiencing. Now that we have their attention, it’s time for them to solve a few of those problems.