From Infidel753:
I should start this post by putting in a word or two for Joe Manchin, who has been getting a lot of flack lately. On a couple of issues, he’s raised legitimate points.
The money being spent on sending covid-19 relief checks to the entire population would be better spent if it were targeted to those with the greatest need (I made a similar point here last year). A person like myself still doing a regular job from home, whose income is unaffected by the pandemic, doesn’t need to get $2,000 in free money from the government, and a person out of work struggling to pay several months of rent and health insurance needs a lot more than $2,000 to actually get out of that hole. It would make more sense to take the same money and funnel it entirely to people in the latter category so we could give, say, $12,000 to each unemployed person, while not wasting money on people like me who still have a normal income.
Similarly, while I fervently support raising the minimum wage to $15 to bring the US more into line with developed-country norms, Manchin has a point that in less-developed parts of the US, $15 might be too high for the local economy to absorb in the same time frame that the more-developed regions need to have it. Perhaps the federal minimum wage could be indexed to the cost of living in each state in some way, or incentives created for each state to raise its own minimum wage to an appropriate level. It’s a legitimate issue.
This being said, the position he and Sinema have taken against eliminating the filibuster is a potentially crippling problem.
The filibuster isn’t an issue for the Biden covid-19 relief plan because that’s being passed via reconciliation. However, at the moment, it appears that not one Republican senator will vote for it. This is legislation which is supported by 83% of the US public (obviously including a lot of Republican voters) and which Standard and Poor says would hugely benefit the economy. If not one Republican senator will vote for that, what are our odds of getting ten of them to support voting-rights protections or a healthcare public option or reining in the Supreme Court? Obviously pretty much zero.
And the Democrats need to get at least some of these things done — in twenty months. That’s the time from now until the 2022 midterm election.