Joe Manchin's criticism of Joe Biden's reconciliation bill is misguided

[Uncle Joe]

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As a number of Nobel Prize-winning economists, including former chief economist for the World Bank Joseph Stiglitz, have pointed out, concerns from Manchin and some centrists and conservatives that the package could cause unmanageable debt and inflation are not well-founded. It would do the opposite. "Because this agenda invests in long-term economic capacity and will enhance the ability of more Americans to participate productively in the economy, it will ease longer-term inflationary pressures," they wrote in an open letter in September.

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But beyond a visceral discomfort with a bill that costs multiple trillions of dollars, Manchin has advanced a values-based argument against some of the policies in the bill. Amidst a tense back-and-forth with Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., over the bill, Manchin this week said he thinks this bill could tilt the U.S. away from being “a compassionate, rewarding society” and toward becoming an “entitlement society.”

That’s a backward way of thinking about these matters. The U.S. is a major outlier among affluent nations in how little it spends on providing social services for families. Most advanced capitalist nations spend far more on social services including child care, child allowances and paid family leave, and these are not societies racked by slothfulness and inefficiency. Instead, many have seen the benefits of policies such as robust family paid leave have a small impact on employers, level the playing field, improve child development and boost long-term economic growth.

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As a nation we need to develop a more vibrant vocabulary for talking about what we owe each other as citizens. In poor countries with no tax base or democratic process for evaluating how policies are administered, establishing economic rights can be difficult. In a democratic country with extraordinary wealth distributed extremely unequally like ours, it is reasonable to demand that every child has access to the resources and care needed to start a good life.

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https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/joe-manchin-s-criticism-joe-biden-s-reconciliation-bill-misguided-n1281132