Some Follow Up On Stories From This Week
This is from The Hill and this should not be a surprise to you:
Senator Manchin has said he is open to a budget reconciliation bill in the ballpark of $1.9 trillion to $2.2 trillion. This is above the limit he set just last week of $1.5 trillion.
He added:
“I’m not ruling anything out, but the bottom line is I want to make sure that we’re strategic and we do the right job and we don’t basically add more to the concerns we have right now.”
Well, thanks for the strength of your non leadership Senator. As usual you made noise and caved.
This is from the Committee to Unleash Prosperity:
Is Bad Manchin Back Already?
Joe Manchin is once again all over the map. In his contract with Chuck Schumer he said emphatically he wouldn’t go over $1.5 trillion price tag.
Well, never mind.
The West Virginia senator told CNN that he was open to a $1.9 to $2.2 trillion version of Biden’s Budget Busting bill, a number much bigger than the $1.5 trillion top line he’d previously said was his limit. The White House is now redrafting its plan to fit into a $2 trillion box.
By our reckoning that’s about $2 trillion too much. He previously had joined with other Democrats to endorse a bill that would have the federal government seize control of elections from the states. That bill likely comes up for a Senate vote this week.
He also told activists who surrounded his boat this past weekend that he is in favor of “tax the rich.” That’s some ally we’ve got there.
Manchin is up for re-election in 2024 and rumors are he may try to recapture the governorship he once held. A new poll finds only 36% of West Virginia voters approve of his performance, while 55% disapprove. Two of three West Virginians voted for Trump.
Maybe you can’t fool all the West Virginians all the time.
On the $3.5 Trillion and the new agreeable limit by Senator Manchin, here are two more comments:
This from the Manhattan Institute:
Manhattan Institute’s Brian Riedl warns the supposed cut down to $1.5 trillion may be all smoke and mirrors:
Democrats are scaling back their proposal even further by simply stuffing the same level of annual spending into a smaller number of years. This means that expensive child care subsidies, family leave, and ‘free’ community college benefits may have their full cost hidden with fake expiration dates early into the 10-year scoring window. Lawmakers fully expect to extend these policies later.”
This from the Wall Street Journal:
The Journal reported that Democrats are now talking about only scoring four or five years of the programs over the 10 year period. This is like a business telling shareholders we made a profit in the last year by counting a full year of the revenues and only six months of the expenditures.
Remember When The President Didn’t See China As A Threat?
This is also from the Committee to Unleash Prosperity:
With each passing week it looks like World War III – between America and China – is coming sooner than we think. It’s not going to be fought with bullets or aircraft carriers. This will likely to be an all-out economic war for global supremacy. The Yuan versus the Dollar. The Nasdaq versus the Shanghai Exchange.
This wasn’t a great time to exchange a president who put America first and recognized the China is a predator economy for a half-witted president who thinks that climate change is a bigger threat to the world than the Maoists in Beijing. While Washington under Biden is embracing economically illiterate big government socialism policies, China is sprinting back to command and control faster than the U.S. That’s a big reason why our stock market is outperforming theirs in 2021.
We were up 20%, China declined by 15%.
The Chinese stock market jitters reflect global investor irritation with iron-fisted political interferences in business affairs. As Foreign Affairs magazine recently put it in a story on the risks of investing in China: “President Xi has placed China on a risky trajectory that threatens the [free market] achievements of his predecessors.”
Sadly, Maoists are firmly entrenched in Beijing and capitalism is losing. Xi’s administration simply doesn’t get what George H.W. Bush once so eloquently describes as “that freedom thing.” Militant social controls and restraints on individual liberty are now being matched with economic controls on Chinese mega-corporations that are trying to vie for industry supremacy in technology, biology, manufacturing and transportation. Is all of this reminiscent of Japan circa 1939?
Gallup On The Media
Here’s a survey released from Gallup that says a lot:
Americans’ trust in the media to report the news fully, accurately and fairly has edged down four percentage points since last year to 36%, making this year’s reading the second lowest in Gallup’s trend.
In all, 7% of U.S. adults say they have “a great deal” and 29% “a fair amount” of trust and confidence in newspapers, television and radio news reporting — which, combined, is four points above the 32% record low in 2016, amid the divisive presidential election campaign between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.
In addition, 29% of the public currently registers “not very much” trust and 34% have “none at all.”
When only 7% say they have a great trust in you and your job is about trust you have a problem.
The Democratic Divide
Here’s a new example of the divide in the Democratic Party. This from Axios.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) withheld support for a joint statement condemning last weekend’s protests against Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) because it also wouldn’t include a rebuke of her political views.
Axios reports that in an email exchange between Senate Democratic leadership aides, Sanders withheld his name from a joint statement declaring protesters who followed Sinema into a bathroom — and filmed her while using the restroom — as “plainly inappropriate and unacceptable.”
He wanted this statement included:
“While we hope Senator Sinema will change her position on prescription drug reform and support a major [budget] reconciliation bill, …”
The request was denied and when it was Senator Sanders office replied that, “Sanders will not be signing, so please cut ‘Senate Democratic Leadership Team’ from headline.”
That’s a divide.
The Noise Over The Debt Ceiling
All the noise over the debt ceiling and now it’s who caved to moved the date back a few months. Blah, blah, blah.
Basically Senator McConnell is telling the Democrats to use reconciliation to solve the issue. His reasoning, you spent without us, you raise the debt limit without us.
The Democrats are howling about the non cooperation and how difficult it is to use reconciliation. Here’s Senator Chris Murphy on that:
“Because it takes an enormous amount of time. You only have one reconciliation a year. So you have to hope that the debt ceiling comes up at a moment when you have a [budget resolution] available.”
Here’s my idea again. How about living within the budget you set, which already contained a debt raising of trillions and not adding more? How about reducing some spending elsewhere to stay within budget? You know, how people do it.