Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia showed again Sunday morning that when it comes to economic issues, he isn’t really the moderate he claims to be, but rather an old-school liberal.
Republicans counting on him on anything other than gun rights (for), abortion (against), or support for fossil fuels (for) are using some sort of broken abacus.
On This Week with George Stephanopoulos, Manchin fielded questions from co-anchor Jonathan Karl. After Manchin sang the praises of the nascent bipartisan deal on so-called “infrastructure” spending, the whole extravagant $1.2 trillion of it, Karl asked him about controversial comments from President Joe Biden (since muddied by semi-conflicting statements), Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and leftist Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. Those three Democrats and others have said they will not support even this expensive spending package unless another, separate package with even more social spending also reaches the president’s desk.
Manchin’s answer sounded far more like that of a New Deal liberal than like a centrist of the 1990s “blue dog” variety. Responding expressly to a clip from Warren (but using the plural “they” to indicate he was speaking more broadly of congressional “progressives”), Manchin said, “We have two tracks. And that’s exactly what I believe is going to happen. And we’ve worked on the one track. We’re going to work on the second track. There’s an awful lot of need. And everything they talked about is something that we need.”
He said “everything.” Even allowing that sometimes an interviewee unintentionally overstates things when speaking somewhat generically, Manchin clearly was embracing the “more is better” approach when considering federal largesse. Karl repeatedly gave Manchin follow-up opportunities to walk back his seeming embrace of the Warren wing of the party, but Manchin wouldn’t.
“You know what Bernie Sanders is working on, he’s talking about a bill that’s $6 trillion,” Karl said. “I know that’s a little rich for — in terms of what you want. But what is your bottom line? How much more do you want?”
Manchin wouldn’t answer, except to say, repeatedly, that he would indeed support the idea of a “next piece of legislation” to spend more than the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill, which already comes atop three massive bills in the past 15 months supposedly aimed at coronavirus relief but actually spreading big government far more broadly. When pressed for “how far are you willing to go” toward Sanders’s $6 trillion desires, Manchin began talking about raising taxes. Ignoring the potentially devastating macroeconomic effects, he said he would raise corporate taxes from 21% to 25% and capital gains taxes from 21% to 28%.
As long as (on paper) the tax hikes would “pay for” the added spending, he said, he could support the spending. “So if that’s $1 trillion or $1.5 trillion or $2 trillion, whatever that comes out to be over a 10-year period, that’s what I would be voting for.”
Even making the economically wrongheaded assumption that making U.S. corporate taxes higher than most of the developed world will actually “pay for” the new spending, how does he justify using the higher taxes for even more spending rather than to finally reduce the biggest peacetime deficits and debt in U.S. history?
A real centrist Democrat would stop piling on. Manchin, though, is a classic tax-and-spend liberal, with the only difference being that he pretends to be providing enough new taxes to cover the biggest spending blowout this nation has ever seen.
Even if Manchin is trying to play a role of someone who is “very centrist,” on economics, he is speaking from somewhere stage left.
