Don't blame Joe Manchin for child poverty
The failure of the expanded CTC gambit is much more complicated
Joe Manchin was a frustrating presence for progressives in the 117th Congress, because his role was generally to be the “bad cop” who said no to things.
I never really thought the level of negativity directed at Manchin made sense — if he wasn’t there, nothing at all that progressives liked would have been possible, so there was no use in being angry about him. Beyond that, though, I think Manchin’s substantive policy judgment was better than progressives on a number of things. He forced the Biden administration’s climate initiatives toward technology neutral, growth-oriented clean energy policy, which is better than the progressive alternative of trying to stymie fossil fuel development. He was also correct to spend the winter of 2021-2022 telling Democrats they needed to take inflation more seriously. This annoyed a lot of people at the time, because most progressives thought he was wrong on the merits and creating unnecessary political problems. In retrospect, though, he was clearly correct. And one of the worst habits in politics is the tendency for people to remember their emotional annoyance at someone for being the skunk at the party while forgetting that the skunk was right. The whole progressive project would be in much better shape if everyone had had Manchin levels of anxiety about inflation earlier.
That said, it is also true that Manchin was consistently deeply skeptical of an expanded refundable Child Tax Credit. Two specific concerns I remember him raising were that it would reduce labor supply (which didn’t happen) and that it would lead to more drug use (which also didn’t happen). I think it’s deeply sad that the expanded CTC ended up being a one-year program rather than a permanent part of the Biden legacy, and Manchin’s skepticism on these grounds absolutely played a role in that.
But I also think there’s a misguided “stab in the back” narrative forming in progressive circles whereby Manchin is a uniquely bad actor here. Bharat Ramamurti, who was deputy director of the National Economic Council during this frustrating period and who is consistently one of the sharpest progressive analysts, alleged that Manchin “single-handedly consigned millions of children to poverty” on the “baseless” belief that the extra money would be used to buy drugs.
I think this analysis is unfair to Manchin personally; his actual role in Democratic Party politics over this period had incredible upside as well as downside. But I also think that as an after-action report, this offers bad lessons about how Democrats can govern more effectively next time.
After I covered the 111th Congress of 2009-2010, my takeaway was basically “fuck those moderate Dems.” I understood the political imperatives facing red state members. But in basically every conflict between the Obama administration and House Blue Dogs or moderate senators, I thought the White House was correct. This was part of the logic of the elite-led transformation of the “veal pen” into “the groups” — it seemed like more leftward pressure across the board would have made the Obama administration more successful. But I just don’t think that’s the right takeaway from 2021-2022. I disagreed with Manchin about the CTC, but the actual issues here were much more complicated than “Joe Manchin is bad.”
The CTC’s weird history
I think it’s important to contextualize what happened with the Child Tax Credit after the election by remembering its strange prehistory.
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