October 7, 2021 at 1:45 p.m.
The Manchin trap
The Manchin trap
To be sure, the Democratic civil war, such as it is, is fun to watch, as progressives threatened to derail the real infrastructure bill of $1.2 trillion if they don't get their way on a fake infrastructure bill costing $3.5 trillion (and actually a lot more than that).
The first bill is a bipartisan effort and actually deals with roads and bridges and broadband - you know, infrastructure - while the second bill is concerned with "human infrastructure," an attempt to treat humans as beings who can breathe only so long as they are hooked up to the giant ventilator that is the federal government.
Said another way, it's a social-justice bill that seeks to transform America into a socialist state.
About $700 billion of the larger bill is just the equivalent of free income being doled out to ever more Americans at a dizzying pace. Welfare, in other words, at a time when the economy is not in recession and employers are begging for workers.
The rest of it is a hodgepodge of climate change activism, social justice measures (money to help ex-inmates open small businesses, for example), free community college, and other expensive social boondoggles.
Again, Americans can be excused for missing the transformative nature of this legislation. After all, there's so much Biden and his minions are doing to distract us from it.
There's the new DOJ campaign, for instance, to brand all parents who dare to criticize school boards as domestic terrorists. There's the Biden administration's unconstitutional vaccine mandate that is already making Americans choose between their personal liberty and health-care freedom and their livelihoods.
There's Democrats hectoring social media giants to censor ever more content. There's the administration's proposal to give the IRS the authority to take a peek at the bank accounts of virtually every American.
There is America shaking its collective head in amazement as football fans fill stadiums by the tens of thousands - at the same time the Delta variant is slinking away into the recesses - but Dr. Anthony Fauci says he still hasn't decided whether families can get together for Christmas.
Say what? Such is the extent of authoritarian delusion, and it's distracting.
But the fiscal radicalism is just as important, and it's time for a wake-up call. For if the Democrats get their way on pressing fiscal issues - and they likely will - America will face its most existential social and economic threat yet.
So why will the Democrats probably get their way? Hasn't that old blue-dog Democrat Joe Manchin, the senator from West Virginia, vowed not to support a $3.5-trillion makeover that will gut the American economy and gaslight the American psyche?
The answer is, it's all a big scam, and Manchin is on board with the radicals. There's a reason, after all, he's still a Democrat in a decidedly Trump state.
Just in the past few days, Manchin, who had said he would not sign off on a social-spending bill that cost more than $1.5 trillion because that would be "fiscal insanity" (yeah, somehow he considered it sane to vote to spend $1.5 trillion on top of the $1.2 trillion in the infrastructure bill and also on top of $5.4 trillion already doled out in pandemic fiscal stimulus), suddenly said there was no such limit.
"I'm not ruling anything out, but the bottom line is, I want to make sure that we're strategic, we do the right job and we don't basically add more to the concerns that we have right now," he said this week.
So now it's about being strategic, not sane. Strategic fiscal insanity is apparently OK.
It's beginning to look like Manchin was playing us all along, and so were his progressive allies. Having Manchin seen in West Virginia as the enemy of progressives helps him politically, while the progressives likely knew he would surrender in the end. Maybe we're wrong, but it looks like they just provided him political cover and he took it.
Truth be told, the devil is in the legislation's details, by which we mean in the policy details, not in the price tag. As former Trump chief of staff and Office of Management and Budget director Mick Mulvaney said in an interview this week, budget writers can manipulate a bill's price tag any way they want.
Here's how Mulvaney explained it: "Over the course of the last six, eight, 12 weeks, they focused on the number, the $3.5 trillion. Is that too much? Is it really 5.5? Will Manchin take 1.9? I think Biden floated two trillion on Friday as a compromise, and here's why that frightens me. If you gave me the bill, ..., over at the Office of Management and Budget, give me an hour with this bill and I could make this bill score at six trillion. I could make the bill score at one trillion without changing any of the underlining policies. I know how to game the system and I can assure you I am not the only one who knows how to do that."
We all already knew that was the truth. It's common knowledge that even at $3.5 trillion the bill would cost much more than that because they score costs only for 10 years when actual costs continue long after a decade, unless there are statutory changes, which can't be assumed.
So the real issue all along hasn't been the price tag because you can make that anything you want it to be. No, Mulvaney explained, the real issue is the policy that those costs implement.
Again, Mulvaney: "My guess is the way this is going to get done is that Democrats are going to game the system, leaving the bill substantively in the same condition it is now, but make it look like it costs $1.9 trillion. Manchin will then be able to say, oh, I can vote for it because it's less and they can say they compromised because they brought the number down and we're going to get the same terrible policies."
Call it falling into the Manchin trap.
But the real impact is in those policy details, Mulvaney advised. Take care of that and you will take care of the attached fiscal problems.
"Republicans, I think, are making a mistake focusing on the dollar figure and instead should be looking at, do we really want this dramatic expansion of government, regardless of what it costs," he said. "If it costs a dollar it's bad. If it costs $100 trillion, it's bad. We should be focusing on the policy as much as we are the numbers."
That Manchin talks only about the numbers and not what climate change policies in the bill might do to West Virginia is troubling, to say the least, and it signals that this is all one big charade.
Again, we hope we are wrong. Maybe Manchin will come through. Maybe the progressives will stand by their word to not compromise on $3.5 trillion and sink the Democratic ship.
But probably not.
Certainly all this may have played out by the time this is published. Whether it is or not, though, whether the infrastructure and socialist master plan bills pass or not, Americans need to turn attention to the social transformation the Biden administration is pursuing through fiscal policy every bit as much as we eyeball his police state mentality.
His fiscal policies mean dollar-for-dollar less investment in the economy for every dollar the administration spends on its big-government spree. America's lower- and middle-income classes will pay the price tag through lost jobs, more inflation, lower relative wages, and a lower standard of living. And we will have enshrined a welfare state that will make more and more citizens dependent on the state, and that will make them feel much more compelled to comply with every government mandate coming down the pike.
That transformation needs to be stopped well before next year's mid-term elections. It's time to contact your lawmakers and tell them to be bold and, most of all, to avoid the Manchin trap.
Once we've fallen completely in, there's no way out.
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