Manchin is right in the sense that he’d be right that someone somewhere is always gaining the system. Like yea someone somewhere might take a day off to go hunting? Yea hate to break it to him but people are already doing that.
He’s got boomer brain where the idea that someone somewhere might potentially have a thought of gaining the system means that you either can’t do it or you have to put in some much shit to guarantee that no one cheats that it makes it impossible for normal people to take advantage of it.
It’s all really an excuse to make the safety net as threadbare as possible. Even centrist Dems have the disease.
I think this attitude is really one of unacknowledged privilege. When the whole world is set up to help you succeed, and you take the basic actions necessary to capitalize on that, then the vast majority of people in that situation attribute 100% of their success to their actions. So this is broader than just “boomer brain”, although that generation may be the all time champs in terms of unacknowledged privilege.
The dude was just running clock the whole time, duh.
This is where the eDem refusal to ever play hardball (except against people who actually want to do good policy) really sucks. Obviously its not “good,” but when GOP people try to pull this shit their message boxes are full of profanity-laced tirades from insane people coupled with a massive propaganda machine putting them on blast. Manchin won’t experience an ounce of discomfort for this shit.
And don’t say “cant be mean he will switch parties.” He stayed a Democrat so he could load the BIF with corporate welfare and lobbyist wet dream corruption, which he only does as Democrat #50.
Ah yes, the man who drives a Maserati and has a yacht because of back door deals he cut for the coal industry and who has a daughter he enabled to make millions off the healthcare industry in secret. He’s definitely someone I am absolutely shocked is not a paragon of integrity.
This … doesn’t sound like a bad deal, except only making pre k 10 years. Might as well make it permanent. The US needs a child tax credit, but if it were a choice of having pre K and the CTC or neither, I’d split the difference
It is but the neo liberal turn has ignoring privilege all wrapped up in it. One of the passages that stuck with me in Perlstein’s Nixonland or The Invisible Bridge when Republicans started turning against the New Deal was there was a bill for funding for fumigation in public housing. The bill was supposed to be an easy pass but Republicans started filibustering it and the sponsor was talking about how rats would nibble at kid’s feet and the senators started laughing at her.
Manchin got the boomer neo-liberal bug where the paradigm was that every poor person is lazy and gaming the system and the only way to discipline them is being at the mercy of the market (and boss). It affected both Republicans and Democrats. That’s the big difference between being a centrist lib and a lefty right now. People talk about how it’s cultural things, but centrist libs will play up identity politics and talk about privilege all day if it’ll help them (see Clinton vs Bernie), but the uncrossable bridge is just letting someone have something no strings attached.
The source of the fuck up goes back to the campaign, when Joe Biden ran on and promised bipartisan cooperation. Remember the super condescending, smug assurances that Mitch McConnell would work with him because they go way back? While anyone with a pulse laughed maniacally (and was in turn marginalized by eDem boomer motherfuckers)?
So fast forward, captain dipshit orients himself (and staffs up around) bipartisanship. This causes him to be so desperate for a bipartisan win that he splits the bills. At which point Mitch won.
Now this rotting corpse of a credit card industry whore and sexual harassment victim degrading crime war loving war machine enabling halfwit is done before he started. Fuck off, asshole.
Shitlibs got high on their own supply and think shit like that and being conservative is why Biden won instead of being Obama VP delivering the black vote plus the media acting like Bernie was Hitler + Stalin
Yes our system of government is completely broken, so the only play for this and any future president is just to go HAM doing everything with executive order and dare the courts to defy him. And then when they do, undermine the courts, etc. At the very least you get credit for trying and exposing the system.
Steeped in social Darwinism, Mellon viewed the acquisition of wealth as a mark of merit and poverty as a failure of character. Mellon wrote in his autobiography that voting rights were responsible for many of society’s ills, driving higher spending, borrowing and taxes. Not far below the surface of these fears was racism. After the Civil War, Mellon toured the South, where he wrote that he was disgusted to see Louisiana’s Legislature captured by what he called “stolid, stupid, rude and awkward field negroes, lolling on the seats or crunching peanuts.”
It’s absolutely this. His daughter was born with a coal spoon in her Mouth and has done nothing but cheated the system and failed upward her whole life. Yet they think she got there through hard work and exceptional talent.
She is nothing but a giant leech on society. She personally is a tax on poor people, faking academic achievement and massively driving up the price of a life saving medicine.
We’re probably only getting part of the story based on who’s leaking it, but, if I had to speculate I could imagine a few possible issues.
If Biden really had his heart set on the child tax credit (maybe because he or some of the Congressional D’s really wanted it as a sort of signature achievement to campaign on), he might have just refused to consider any bill that did not contain it.
The tweet says it would have had the same spending on climate, but I’m not sure if that means that the spending would have been distributed in the same way or just that the total amount spent would be the same. If Mancin was going to, say, shift money from solar panels to “clean coal” subsidies I could see how that might be a no go even if he tried to sell it as “$500 billion for climate.”
Reading between the lines of all of this, there was a big battle over how to game the CBO scores. IIRC, the CBO scores bills based on their forecasted impact during the next 10 years. So, if you want the price of a bill to appear smaller, you delay the start of some programs, or you have them end after a few years (while hoping to have the votes to extend them when you reach the deadline). The BBB had a lot of this type of gamesmanship because there was so much focus on hitting a certain target number. It sounds like Mancin basically called out the game and said the bill was too big because he assumed that some of the funding that was designed to expire wouldn’t really do so, so he wanted the bill to contain fewer programs (that were actually fully funded for 10 years). The problem is that some of the partially funded programs have support from Biden and members of Congress who might not be cool with them being completely zeroed out.
