Manchin Gangs up with Republicans to End Critical Help to



Economic Policy | Joe Manchin
by Joan McCarter | January 4, 2022 - 8:30am

“It’s going to be hard next month, and just thinking about it, it really makes me want to bite my nails to the quick,” Anna Lara told The New York Times in December. She’s talking about the end of the monthly Child Tax Credit payments; the last payment went out on December 15. She’s a mother of two young children and she lives in Huntington, West Virginia. “Honestly, it’s going to be scary. It’s going to be hard going back to not having it.”

It’s her senator, Democrat Joe Manchin, who has given Senate Republicans an assist in blocking President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better plan, and the extension of those monthly payments. Manchin has privately told colleagues that he’s opposed to those payments because he believes parents will spend the money on drugs instead of on their children. “Your children watch you, and if you worry, they catch on to that,” Lara said. “With that extra cushion, we didn’t have to worry all the time.” The money has helped her family since she lost her job in the p******c and hasn’t been able to return to work because of the cost of childcare. Her partner still has his job, but the payments have helped them meet all their living expenses—replacing a broken appliance, car repairs, a new car seat for their 6-year old, and new shoes. Not illegal drugs.

According to nonpartisan, independent research from the Center on Poverty & Social Policy at Columbia University, the payments kept 3.8 million out of poverty in November of 2021. In just that month, the families of 61.3 million children received the payments. That resulted in a nearly 30% reduction in poverty rates compared to the level they estimate in the absence of the payments.

The credit was temporarily expanded and extended in the American Rescue Plan signed into law by President Biden last spring, but Congress and Biden intended to make the program permanent and included it in the Build Back Better plan. The payments were increased from the previous maximum of $2,000 annually per child to $3,600 annually for children up to age 5, and $3,000 for older children. The other change was to make those payments monthly, instead of coming in one payment after families file their tax returns. It also expanded the program to people who hadn’t been able to get the full credit because they had too little income. That’s what’s really helping reduce poverty among children—about 1/3 of the nation’s kids (half of Black and Hispanic children and 70% of kids with single parents) previously didn’t qualify for the full credit.

“What we’ve seen with the child tax credit is a policy success story that was unfolding, but it’s a success story that we risk stopping in its tracks just as it was getting started,” Megan Curran, director of policy at Columbia’s Center on Poverty and Social Policy, told the Times. “The weight of the evidence is clear here in terms of what the policy is doing. It’s reducing child poverty and food insufficiency.”

Another argument against the policy has been that it would discourage work, but there’s been no evidence of that happening, either. In fact, says Samuel Hammond, director of poverty and welfare policy at the Niskanen Center, it is probably encouraging more parents to work because they can more easily afford child care. “There’s every reason to believe that in the current labor market, the child tax credit is work-enabling, and no evidence to the contrary has been presented,” he told the Times. He wrote a report last summer estimating the expanded payments would create the equivalent of 500,000 full-time jobs and provide $27 billion in increased consumer spending.

That doesn’t mean it’s contributing to inflation, one economist says, as Manchin and Republicans have argued. “That’s a noninflationary program,” said Joe Brusuelas, chief economist at the accounting firm RSM. “That’s dedicated toward necessities, not luxuries.” Or illegal drugs.

As of now, Manchin is still demanding that either a further income limit is placed on the child tax credits, or the provision is removed entirely. The CTC does already have income limits for 2021 filers, starting at above $150,000 for joint filers, $112,500 for heads of household, and $75,000 for single filers—and no, it makes no sense for single parents to be penalized with that lower-income threshold. Those limits were higher under the Rescue Plan, phasing out at $200,000 and $400,000 levels are where the child tax credit phases out faster for individual or joint tax filers.

Nonetheless, and probably because he hasn’t done his homework to know already that the CTC is means-tested, Manchin wants it to be limited. He’s also said maybe there should be work requirements, a Dickensian solution at any time but particularly with C****-** resurging and the omicron variant taking hold.

Also, the omicron variant is causing a massive C***D surge, and schools and businesses are going to start closing again and heating bills in much of the country are going to rise and the monthly CTC payments have ended. None of which Manchin gives a genuine s**t about. Never mind that 181,000 West Virginia families got their final monthly checks last month. The checks averaged $446 and reached 305,000 children. That’s 93% of the state’s children, 50,000 of whom are at risk of their families falling into poverty if the program isn’t resumed.

Among them is Anna Lara’s family. “Right now, both of my vehicles need gas and I can’t put gas in the car,” she told the Times. “But it’s OK, because I’ve got groceries in the house and the kids can play outside.” At least it was okay in December.

by Patriot Outlook
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk doesn’t have much in the way of nice things to say about Biden’s expensive Build Back Better plan. In fact, he believes the entire thing should just be scrapped.
While speaking at an event sponsored by the Wall Streat Journal, Musk pointed out that once a lot of these subsidies, regulations, and rules pass, there’s not really a way to get rid of them, and to be sure, he has a huge problem with a lot of what’s in the bill.
“Honestly, it might be better if the bill doesn’t pass,” Musk said.
Musk detailed how we would effectively be spending $3 trillion more than we earn and that if it were a private business, this would be counted as a huge loss. Add on top of that all the other obligations already piled onto the taxpayer such as social security. It also hinges on nothing else bad happening that would further impact the economy, which no one can actually predict.
Musk went on to say that the government should act as a referee and not a player on the field, adding that government should just get out of the way and not impede progress. Moreover, the rules and regulations they impart don’t just go away, making it harder for nations to advance.
Many of these rules stagnate as the situations around their creation change, making getting rid of them important according to Musk. “Rules and regulations are immortal,” he said. “They don’t die. The vast majority of rules and regulations live forever… there’s not really an effective garbage collection system for removing rules and regulations, so this hardens the arteries of civilization where you are able to do less and less over time.”
Musk was asked about whether or not he supports the subsidies being thrown toward electric vehicles.
“We don’t. So there’s no need for supporting a charging network. I would delete it. Delete. I’m literally saying get rid of all subsidies. I’m literally saying get rid of all subsidies,” he said.
Musk said that when he started Tesla and began rolling out electric cars, there were no expectations of subsidies. The subsidies being cooked up in the BBB plan are a result of General Motors lobbying from them, but Musk reiterated that subsidies do need to die.
He finished off by making it clear that all the government spending happening right now needs to stop. “In general, if we don’t cut government spending, something really bad is going to happen,” said Musk. “This is crazy. Our spending is so far in excess of revenue it’s insane.”
While there is a subsidy for electric vehicles in the BBB bill, Tesla would reap almost none of it since it’s primarily geared toward companies that utilize union labor. This excludes Tesla and other manufacturers like Toyota and effectively making this a payoff to American unions. Moreover, Musk is looking at this bill from the perspective of a business leader and seeing the cracks and pitfalls of the spending our government is doing, labeling it as “insane.” Musk pointed out that the government is “a corporation in the limit” with a monopoly on power and the only corporation that can legally do violence. Considering it’s a corporation that can’t go bankrupt, handing it more money than it actually deserves is a horrid idea.

Nothing on the right is as extreme as those on the left. Our own government has gone extreme left. Fear our government as they will break your door down and lock you up if you don't acquiesce to their demands. The mandate of the toxic W***n jab is just one example of l*****t government overreach and corruption. An unfree press is just another example of far left radicalism. Even businesses are going far left as they fire people for not complying with l*****t government mandates and act like they own your body. Fear the left, not the right.

"Even as the mob ran screaming and smashing through the capitol on 6 January , it was clear this was a c**p attempt. It was equally clear that it had been instigated by the then president and his circle, much of whose audience in the “stop the steal” rally would become that mob."

( Quotes are from: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/dec/13/america-witnessed-a-c**p-attempt-now-its-sleep-walking-into-another-disaster )

"That the goal was a c**p is a solemnly horrifying fact. That those who orchestrated it and those who have excused and dismissed it afterward continue to conspire against the rule of law and the right of the people to choose their leaders is another such fact."

"The crisis isn’t just that we had a c**p attempt almost a year ago, but that the Republican party has itself become so venal, so corrupt, so ruthless in its quest for power, that it seems assured that we will see further attempts to overrule any e******n outcomes they don’t like. Already the kind of e******n laws they’ve pushed across the country seem aimed at such goals, and v**er suppression has long been one of their anti-democratic tactics (it played a substantial role in Trump’s 2016 win ...)."

"The Republicans made a devil’s bargain decades ago, when they decided that they would not change course to win the v**es of an increasingly nonwhite, increasingly progressive people, but would try to suppress those who would v**e against them."

"The refusal to recognize the authority of Congress by Trump associates ... is a further sign of their belief ... that they make their own rules."