Manchin Making Moves

 

Reverend Barber, left, and some West Virginians outside the Hart Building, 14 December, demanding Manchin's cooperation on the Biden agenda, Build Back Better and voting rights. Photo by Tom Williams / CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images, via The Nation, whose headline was "West Virginians Give Manchin a Lump of Coal for Christmas".

Got any New Year optimism? 

I'm pretty cheered by this Axios report

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) is open to reengaging on the climate and child care provisions in President Biden's Build Back Better agenda if the White House removes the enhanced child tax credit from the $1.75 trillion package — or dramatically lowers the income caps for eligible families, people familiar with the matter tell Axios

assuming it's Manchin himself, directly or indirectly, who engineered the story, anxious to get his name back in the mouths of the panditry as soon as possible, which would mean it's probably true.

The bargaining chip he seems to be pushing back onto the table is the one I've been recommending on and off as the best way to buy him off: cutting some of the wealthier recipients off from receiving the enhanced child tax credit, which in its current form is getting fully paid to households with an income of up to $150,000 (approximately the bottom 90%), but only half that for single-parent households, which is nuts. 

Because I'm kind of receptive to one of the points Manchin might be making on this: advocates love telling us that the expanded CTC reduces childhood poverty by something like 50%, an unarguably worthy goal (a lot less than 100%, of course, but infinitely more than zero), but it does that by giving an awful lot of cash to people who are far from poor. I dislike this, as you know, because I think it maintains and even increases economic inequality (while the poor are using the money to stay where they are, treading water, the well-off can invest the money, rising higher). At best, it's just really inefficient, and at worst, it's a bad political error.

Centrist Escapism

One good reason for being pleased you're not at the center of the universe, according to nautil.us, would be that means you're not "he filth and mire of the world, the worst, lowest, most lifeless part of the universe, the bottom story of the house". Illustration by Rauner Special Collections Library.

Dr. Krugman savages Andrew Yang, mayoral candidate ("Andrew Yang Hasn't Done the Math"), over his claim in the 2020 presidential campaign that America's big problem is job loss due to rapid automation, for which the only cure is giving everybody a "universal" "basic" "income" of $1000 a month:

But that’s not what we’re seeing. In fact, the lead article in the current issue of the Monthly Labor Review, published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is an attempt to understand the productivity slowdown — the historically low growth in productivity since 2005. This slowdown has been especially pronounced in manufacturing, which has seen hardly any productivity rise over the past decade.

I made similar points back in 2019, eliciting a furious response from Yang, who decried “incomplete statistics” and declared that “I’ve done the math.” But if he had done the math, he didn’t share it with the rest of us; all he offered were anecdotes. Yes, at any given time there are always some workers being displaced by technology. The question is whether this is happening faster now than in the past. The numbers say that it isn’t.

For the Record: Debate

Via The Log Cabin Sage, who retails a great story from the 1858 Senate campaign of how Douglas snidely noted that Lincoln had managed a grocery store in the course of his career, and showed himself to be "a very good bartender". Lincoln came back to it in his response: “What Mr. Douglas has said, gentlemen, is true enough. I did keep a grocery, and I did sell cotton, candles, and cigars, and sometimes whiskey; but I remember in those days, Mr. Douglas was one of my best customers. Many a time have I stood on one side of the counter and sold whiskey to Mr. Douglas on the other side; but the difference between us now is this: I have left my side of the counter, but Mr. Douglas still sticks to his as tenaciously as ever.”

Touché, gentlemen.

Candidate Yang made a couple of really annoying historical errors, when he suggested that folks in the ancient times when they used to debate socialism and capitalism never anticipated how economies would be transformed by automation

https://t.co/dY8d7cU1h2 pic.twitter.com/uZq9kDFokI

— Pray For the Opposite (@Yastreblyansky) February 8, 2020

and claimed the support of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., for his silly "universal basic income" program

Dear Andrew Yang, Dr. King's MINIMUM guaranteed income pegged to the median wage was a very different animal from your $1000 universal handout, a lovely present for somebody like me but not close to a living income for those who need it.

— Pray For the Opposite (@Yastreblyansky) February 8, 2020

Other than that, the candidates were on their best behavior, and I was impressed: