Killing Build Back Better kept inflation and culture-war damage from being much more severe.
Killing Build Back Better kept inflation and culture-war damage from being much more severe.
W est Virginia senator Joe Manchin is in the news again for supporting the Biden administration’s latest nominee to lead the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, Steven Dettelbach, and for showing some signs that he would support raising the age from 18 to 21 for certain gun purchases. I’m wondering why he isn’t in the headlines every day as the savior of the Democratic Party.
The Democrats have two intractable political problems right now. The first is inflation. Gas is now, on average across the country, $5 a gallon. The consequent price increases on every other product that travels to its destination via trucks is doing huge damage to family budgets.
The second problem is that Democrats antagonized many of the voters who turned to them in the 2018 elections to act as a check on Donald Trump. Democrats have, in a very short time, become associated with an extreme ideological fringe that has antagonized suburban parents by imposing the latest progressive intellectual fads as a woke curriculum in schools.
Joe Manchin has prevented each of these problems from being much, much worse than they are. First, his opposition dramatically scaled down and ultimately halted the passage of Build Back Better, which began as a $6 trillion spending package meant to completely renovate the American social compact and expand the reach of the federal government into the lives of Americans.
Even the scaled-down version of Build Back Better was causing economic commentators to worry about its effect on inflation. “The House bill as currently drafted will add ~$200 billion to next year’s deficit alone. I don’t see how we can do that when inflation is 2-3x our target,” said Ben Ritz, the director of the Progressive Policy Institute’s Center for Funding America’s Future. The head of Bank of America’s global economics research predicted, “It will make the labor market even hotter and create even more price pressure.”
Claims that Build Back Better had counterinflationary measures, such as increased taxes, tend to ignore the fact that many of these “pay-fors” were never meant to be implemented, only to act as budgeting smoke and mirrors to give wavering politicians such as Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema cover.
But even the scaled-down version would have made the second problem much worse. Build Back Better’s dramatic federal entry into day care was loaded with culture-war restrictions. A huge number of preschools and day-care centers are run out of churches, synagogues, and other religious institutions. Build Back Better would have forbidden the use of federal dollars at these preschools, effectively using $390 billion in federal funding to run these institutions out of the market.
The culture-war effect is to both limit the influence of religious organizations and to deprive them of the minimal amount of income they receive in rents for their spaces. Likely, this would mean some churches would close altogether. Pre-K teachers would be mandated to go through the same, progressive-captured education-degree process as their peers in primary school. The institutional result would be to liberate woke educators from even more local restraints and give them greater access to even younger children. This is besides the hundreds of millions of grant dollars attached to the bill that would act as a kind of jobs program for progressives.
Build Back Better went through the House before the full impact of inflation could be seen on the American economy and before it fully dawned on progressives how effective conservative activists such as Chris Rufo could be, let alone politicians like Ron DeSantis. Manchin saved Democrats from worse inflation, and from their own worse impulses on education reform. Build Back Better would have extended the effects of both beyond the 2022 elections and made them relevant issues in 2024. If Democrats have any hope of recovering from the early excesses of the Biden years, it’s thanks to one man.