Here’s the latest news out of West Virginia:
Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) has suffered a decline in his approval rating among voters in his home state, according to the figures in the latest WV MetroNews West Virginia Poll.
Manchin now enjoys 42 percent approval in West Virginia, compared with 37 percent of respondents who disapprove. This is a notable change compared with results in the same poll in October, 2020.
The poll comes as Democrats in the House and Senate are pushing ahead with President Joe Biden's $3.5 trillion infrastructure proposal, though Manchin has indicated he will not support that amount of spending.
The last WV MetroNews West Virginia Poll in October showed the Democratic senator with 44 percent approval from likely voters and 44 percent disapproval, meaning both his approval and disapproval have declined.
A key figure here is poll respondents who said they were unsure whether they approved of Manchin. In October 2020, that figure was 13 percent but in the latest polling it had risen to 21 percent.
Manchin has seen a relatively steady decline in his approval rating since a WV MetroNews West Virginia Poll in 2019 found that he had 49 percent approval. He was reelected to the Senate in 2018 and will face voters again in 2024 if he chooses to run.
Yep, looks like West Virginia voters are getting sick of Manchin’s bull shit. Especially his latest attempt to low ball President Biden in infrastructure:
Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.) has privately warned the White House and congressional leaders that he has specific policy concerns with President Biden's $3.5 trillion social spending dream — and he'll support as little as $1 trillion of it.
- At most, he's open to supporting $1.5 trillion, sources familiar with the discussions say.
Why it matters: In a 50-50 Senate, that could mean the ceiling for Biden's "Build Back Better" agenda — and that many progressive priorities, from universal preschool to free community college, are in danger of dying this Congress.
- Manchin also has committed to paying for any new spending with new revenue, which will limit the ultimate size of any final package.
- This amount would be on top of a $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure deal passed by the Senate and awaiting House action.
Manchin’s arguments have been completely wrong:
Senator Joe Manchin jolted the Democrats this week by writing an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal demanding a “strategic pause” on President Joe Biden’s $3.5 trillion economic agenda. The West Virginia Democrat, who is a key vote in the evenly divided Senate, cited “an overheating economy” that warranted a go-slow approach. Has Manchin even seen the economic data lately?
Regardless of whether you think the economy demands more fiscal stimulus, it would be a stretch to say it is overheating. The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s widely followed GDPNow index, which aims to track the economy in real time, has fallen off a cliff amid a string of disappointing data, dropping to 3.66% from around 10% a couple of months ago. The team at Morgan Stanley led by chief U.S. economist Ellen Zentner just slashed its forecast for gross domestic product growth this quarter to 2.9% from 6.5%.
Citigroup Inc.’s Economic Surprise Index, which measures the degree to which data is either beating or missing expectations, is not only back below zero but is at levels not seen since the early days of the pandemic when it looked as if the economy — and world — was falling apart. Of the firm’s 17 such indexes tracking countries and regions, only Norway is underperforming to a greater degree than the U.S.
Here’s what is concerning: As ugly as those indexes are, they have yet to be updated to account for the monthly employment report that was released Friday. It showed that the economy added 235,000 jobs in August, far below the 733,000 median estimate of economists and strategists surveyed by Bloomberg.
To be clear, none of this suggests the economy is teetering on the edge of a recession. Annualized GDP growth of 3.66%, or even 2.9% for that matter, would compare favorably with most quarters since the financial crisis more than a decade ago. The average in those years was a measly 2.2%. Still, it is not hard to be just a little concerned. After all, the delta variant of Covid-19 is raging through the economy when some 6 million Americans are out of work and supplemental pandemic unemployment insurance programs are set to expire on Sept. 6 for the roughly half of U.S. states that haven’t ended them already.
Completely stupid:
Manchin also complained in his op-ed that Republicans used reconciliation to pass tax cuts in 2017 that benefited rich investors more than workers, while adding more than $1 trillion to the national debt. Does the senator think the GOP won’t use reconciliation again when they’re back in charge?
Moreover, Friday’s bad jobs report shows that the economy is not overheating, as Manchin fears. The delta variant has hobbled the recovery. Economists expect September’s employment numbers to be even worse.
And contrary to Manchin’s intimations, this bill can be fully funded. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who can afford no more than three Democratic defections, says the House will only approve something that can get 50 votes in the Senate. A four-page menu of potential ways to raise revenue as part of the package has been circulating among senators.
If it’s the debt Manchin’s genuinely most concerned about, why doesn’t he reconsider his resistance to raising the corporate tax rate as part of the funding mechanism?
Also:
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.
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.
If you are one of Manchin’s constituents, you might want to contact his office and let him know that you support the full $3.5 trillion dollar package. Click here to contact his office.