Inflation Hawk Joe Manchin Doesn’t Regret Voting For Biden’s $1.9 Trillion Rescue Plan
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WASHINGTON ― Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) says Congress shouldn’t spend any more money because of rising inflation, but he has no regrets about supporting the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan.
“The president needed it. That was his first shot out of the box. I gave [my vote] because the president wanted it,” Manchin told HuffPost on Thursday, referring to Joe Biden.
The bill may have contributed to rising prices and has emerged as Republicans’ top talking point about why Democrats are bad for the economy.
Democrats passed the bill last March over unanimous Republican objections, boosting unemployment benefits, giving state governments hundreds of billions in assistance and sending most Americans another round of direct payments, worth $1,400 per person.
“It helped a lot,” Manchin said. “But I wish it would have been done a different way and went through a different process. But he asked me to do it and I did it.”
The senator blocked a major social spending bill last year, largely, he said, because more direct support for U.S. households would have worsened inflation. The Build Back Better bill is now on the back burner and Democrats are discussing other ways to address rising costs.
“For months, I have been ringing the alarm bell about inflation,” Manchin said in a statement earlier this month. “It’s beyond time for the Federal Reserve to tackle this issue head-on, and Congress and the Administration must proceed with caution before adding more fuel to an economy already on fire.”
Annual inflation surged to 7.5% in January, contributing to a major decline in consumer sentiment and presidential poll numbers. Economists say supply bottlenecks contributed to the rising prices, but so did consumer demand, thanks partly to the unprecedented levels of income support Democrats enacted. And the pandemic shifted consumer spending more toward goods than services.
Republicans blame inflation mostly on the American Rescue Plan, even though Congress had previously approved more than $3 trillion in COVID-19 relief measures with broad bipartisan support.
“At this time last year, Washington Democrats were beginning their quest to dump trillions of dollars in left-wing spending on a recovering economy that already had the preconditions for some inflation,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said in a speech on Tuesday.
“Everybody warned Democrats to pump the brakes,” he added.
A key provision of the American Rescue Plan expanded the child tax credit into a child allowance, giving parents as much as $300 per month per child. The policy reduced child poverty, according to early estimates, and Democrats considered it a legacy achievement.
Democrats wanted to continue the child payments as part of Build Back Better, but Manchin objected, even though he had voted for it as part of the earlier bill. Inflation aside, Manchin has told his colleagues that he thinks parents waste the money on drugs.
Although reviving the Build Back Better legislation as a whole didn’t come up in a Democratic caucus lunch attended by top White House officials on Capitol Hill on Thursday, senators did discuss elements of the bill, such as proposals aimed at reducing the cost of child care and prescription drugs.
“They’re very much concerned about the cost, absolutely,” Manchin said after the lunch when asked about the White House’s message on inflation. “We didn’t have a lot of concrete answers on that one. People have a lot of ideas on how to do it. My idea is to get your house in order.”
This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.
