Infrastructure Summer: Joe Manchin’s Symphony of Disingenuousness

He mumbles about inflation to try and stop a bill that’s primarily concerned with reducing inflation.

Let’s say I didn’t know anything about the big budget reconciliation bill working its way through Congress this month. (Believe me, I’d love to say that; things would be much easier if I didn’t.) If non-aware me read through the entirety of Joe Manchin’s op-ed in Friday’s Wall Street Journal, which said that the bill is too expensive and just not right at this time, I wouldn’t know anything more about it. While Manchin ably demonstrates how a conservative Democrat representing a red state can preen about concepts like inflation and the deficit and spending trillions of dollars, he explains nothing about what the bill he opposes actually does, whom it would help, and what specific parts he disfavors.

Evidently, Manchin doesn’t want you to know too much about the bill he’s trying to kill. Or at least, he doesn’t want you to know why he doesn’t like it. Because if Manchin were truly concerned that we’ve let costs for working families run out of control and we must avoid passing a terrible future on to the next generation, he would be the first in line to pass the reconciliation bill.

About the only thing Manchin lets on in his op-ed is that the reconciliation bill would spend $3.5 trillion. (In reality it doesn’t, because there are offsetting tax increases and budget savings, but let’s put that aside for a second.) But if you boil it all down, the bill has two main goals. The first aligns perfectly with Manchin’s aims of controlling inflation.

More than half of the reconciliation bill attempts to take the biggest drivers of the increase in cost of living in American life over the past 40 years—health care, education, and housing—and bring those costs down for working families. These costs in particular have been the greatest hurdle to upward mobility and a sustainable middle-class lifestyle. The bill is singularly oriented toward reducing those costs.

It tries to do this at every stage of the life cycle. It gives subsidies to make child care affordable and establishes universal pre-kindergarten. It makes community colleges tuition-free, thereby creating a public option to cost-prohibitive higher education. It seeks to build two million new housing units, and also lower housing costs through a wide range of programs, from zoning reform to community land trusts. It subsidizes insurance premiums for Obamacare recipients on the exchanges, and converts unpaid family and medical leave to paid, so workers can afford to experience a pregnancy or the care of a parent. For seniors, it cuts costs by expanding Medicare to encompass dental, vision, and hearing, and it negotiates prices on prescription drugs to bring down those costs. And it subsidizes home and community-based services to drastically reduce the cost of living in place at the end of life.

I won’t even go into the various tax breaks and program expansions for working families in the bill, from a bulked-up child nutrition program to extensions of the enhanced Child Tax Credit and Earned Income Tax Credit. But the goal of those programs is to lift families out of poverty and make their budgets more manageable.

The health, education, and housing parts comprise an enormous chunk of the bill, and they’re all quite disinflationary. It’s not just that the bill’s spending goes over a ten-year time horizon and has offsets and therefore is not in the same category as, say, the short-term stimulus of the American Rescue Plan. It’s that it aims to make living in America more financially sustainable, by attacking the biggest costs people face.

Therefore it’s completely misleading to object to moving forward because of short-term inflationary pressures that have already begun to decelerate. Manchin is just not being straight about this aspect of the package.

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.

President Biden’s American Jobs and Families Plans, which include all the elements in the proposed reconciliation bill, are even popular in West Virginia. In May, Data for Progress found both favored by double digits, despite Biden’s unpopularity in the state. Manchin doesn’t want to actually come out against an unpopular policy in his own state. Instead, he leashes his opposition to some garbled nonsense about inflation, when in fact, this is an inflation-fighting bill. He doesn’t want people to know that he’s trying to prevent his rich pals from having to chip in to allow middle-class families to better keep up with the cost of living.