What Joe Manchin's State Would Gain From The Bill He's Blocking
West Virginians desperately need the support and relief that the Biden agenda seeks to deliver
One of the biggest impediments to passing President Joe Biden's "Build Back Better" legislation right now is Joe Manchin, the Democratic senator from West Virginia. Over and over again, he has said the bill is too big -- that he will not support $3.5 trillion in new federal outlays over the next ten years, or anything close to that amount.
That could reflect a principled policy position, a sense of what's necessary politically or both. But it's yet another example of that topline figure dominating the debate, with little attention to the other part of the story -- i.e., what that new federal spending would buy.
For my latest HuffPost article, I attempted (once again) to fill in that part of the conversation, by looking more closely at one of the states that stands to benefit the most from the new spending.
That state is West Virginia.
This shouldn't surprise anyone. Manchin's home state is one of the nation's poorest and its public services don't come anywhere close to meeting its public's needs. That's especially true for the big services that Biden's "care agenda" seeks to bolster: child care and home care for elderly and disabled Americans. In a nationwide report card on the adequacy of these and related services that came out this week, West Virginia was one of just five states to get an "F."
For the article, I spoke to some child care providers in West Virginia, just to get a clearer sense of what they are seeing first-hand. It backs up the report card finding. Most of the kids in their centers are subsidized, but even with the assistance many families struggle to pay tuition. The centers themselves run on threadbare budgets that make it difficult to hire and then keep talented workers.
“I know I have three or four who are at poverty level incomes,” one child care operator, from a rural community on the state's southeast border, told me. “They’re here because they want to be here and they love children. They are worth more than we can pay.”
Manchin has said he worries about the economic effects of so much spending, and whether the federal government would have resources to respond to future crises. That's a separate and worthwhile discussion to have.
But once again, this debate is strangely one-sided. A conversation about the economic effects of these proposals should also account for the benefits these initiatives can have -- like creating a generation of children better prepared to succeed in school and the working world, or giving working adults the time and resources to educate themselves and find better jobs.
Here’s a link to the article:
As always, thank you for reading.