I’ll leave the savvy political analysis to others. I don’t know why Senator Joe Manchin apparently decided to go back on an explicit promise
he made to President Biden. Naïvely, I thought that even in this era of
norm-breaking, honoring a deal you’ve just made would be one of the
last norms to go, since a reputation for keeping your word once given is
useful even to highly cynical politicians. I also don’t know what, if
anything, can be saved from the Build Back Better framework.
What
I do know is that there will be huge human and, yes, economic costs if
Biden’s moderate but crucial spending plans fall by the wayside.
Failure
to enact a decent social agenda would condemn millions of American
children to poor health and low earnings in adulthood — because that’s
what growing up in poverty does. It would condemn millions more to
inadequate medical care and financial ruin if they got ill, because
that’s what happens when people lack adequate health insurance. It would
condemn hundreds of thousands, maybe more, to unnecessary illness and
premature death from air pollution, even aside from the intensified risk
of climate catastrophe.
I’m not speculating here. There’s overwhelming evidence
that children in low-income families who receive financial aid are
significantly healthier and more productive than those who didn’t once
they become adults. Uninsured Americans
often lack access to needed medical care and face unaffordable bills.
And studies show that policies to mitigate climate change will also
yield major health benefits from cleaner air over the next decade.
As
an aside, it’s not clear how many Americans realize the extent to which
we’re falling behind other nations in terms of meeting basic human
needs. For example, I still keep running into people who believe that we
have the world’s highest life expectancy, when the reality is that we
can expect to live between three and five fewer years than citizens of most European countries.
There are also, by the way, large and growing gaps between U.S. states. In 1979 life expectancy in West Virginia was
only about 14 months shorter than in New York; by 2016 the gap had
widened to six years. And yes, Manchin’s home state would benefit
immensely from the social spending its Democratic senator seems
determined to block.
The weakness of
the U.S. social safety net also has economic consequences. It’s true
that we still have high gross domestic product per capita — but that’s
largely because Americans take far less vacation time
than their counterparts abroad, which means that they produce more
because they work more hours. In other ways we lag. Even before the
pandemic, Americans in their prime working years were less likely to be employed
than citizens of Canada or many European countries, probably in part
because we don’t help adults stay in the work force by providing child
care and parental leave.
But can we
afford to make our lives better? One answer is that other rich countries
seem to manage it just fine. Another answer is that Manchin’s objections to the proposed legislation evaporate under scrutiny.
Manchin
asserted that the Congressional Budget Office determined that the cost
of the bill is “upwards of $4.5 trillion.” No, it didn’t. That was a
Republican-demanded estimate of outlays — not the considerably smaller impact on the deficit
— under the assumption that everything in the legislation would be made
permanent, which isn’t what the bill says. And if Congress did vote to
extend programs like the child tax credit, it would probably also vote
for revenue offsets. The budget office analysis of the legislation as
actually written — which found it roughly deficit-neutral — is a much better guide to its likely fiscal impact than this rigged hypothetical.
As for Manchin’s claim that we have a “staggering” national debt, maybe it’s worth noting that federal interest payments
as a percentage of G.D.P. are only half what they were under Ronald
Reagan, and that if you adjust for inflation — as you should — they’re basically zero.
What
about inflation? The proposed spending in Build Back Better is spread
over multiple years, so it wouldn’t do a lot to raise overall demand in
the near term — the first-year addition to the deficit would be just 0.6 percent of G.D.P., which isn’t enough to make much difference to inflation in any model I know. Besides, the Federal Reserve
has just made it clear that it’s ready to raise interest rates if
inflation doesn’t subside, so government spending should matter even
less.
As I said, I’m not going to try
to analyze Manchin’s thought processes, and I’ll leave it to others to
speculate about his personal motives. What I can say is that the letter
he released to explain why he said what he said on Fox News doesn’t
read like a carefully worked-out policy statement; it doesn’t even read
like a coherent ideological manifesto. Indeed, it feels rushed — a grab
bag of Republican talking points hastily trotted out in an attempt to
justify his abrupt betrayal and to portray himself as a victim.
Sorry, but no. America — not a senator who’s taking heat for a broken promise — is the victim in this story.
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