…like Joe Manchin
Joe Manchin told allies that he thinks people who get the Child Tax Credit are using it for illegal drugs. That shows what the so-called man of the people really thinks about the people.
He is wrong.
The fate of monthly child tax credit payments, which are set to expire at the end of this month, is murkier than ever after Senator Joe Manchin on Sunday said he wouldn’t vote for the Build Back Better Act, which would extend regular cash injections.
The senator from West Virginia has cited the bill’s cost and its potential to exacerbate inflation. He has also said he wants there to be a work requirement to receive the benefit and to limit payments to those making less than $200,000 annually. “I want social reforms to the point that [there is] responsibility and accountability,” he said in an interview with MetroNews on Monday.
Overwhelmingly, people who have received the child tax credit payments have used it for food, rent, and utilities and to pay off debt, data from the U.S. Census Bureau has found.
Most parents used the advance payments for necessities
The credit functions as an advance for the tax refund two-parent households making less than $150,000 per year receive. Parents and caregivers get up to $300 per month for every child in their household under six and $250 per month for each older child. Families received the last of the six installments on December 15. The White House is exploring doubling payments in February, if legislation to extend the benefit passes.
So far, the majority of households making less than $50,000 per year are putting the payments toward debt, an August survey by the U.S. Census Bureau found. Higher income families were more likely to be saving the money.StatusInvestors Press for More LGBTQ Members on Bank Boards
Another report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found 91% of households making less than $35,000 per year used the money to pay for food, shelter, clothing and other necessities. Black and Hispanic families were more likely to use their credits on education-related costs, such as school supplies.
The Biden administration has touted the initiative as a way to reduce child poverty. A study from Columbia University found that making the payments permanent could reduce child poverty in the U.S. by 40%. After the first credits went out in July, food insecurity in households with kids dropped from 11% to 8.4%, the Census bureau found.
One in four parents with young children also use the credits to pay for child care, an October survey by the Census Bureau found. The Build Back Better Act sets aside $390 billion for subsidized child-care costs and universal, free pre-school.
There has always been an impulse in American society to blame the poor for their plight with suggestions they are lazy and corrupt. Needless to say, to the extent a group of “deserving poor” exists, they tend to be white folks.
Only 3.5% of West Virginia is Black, so in Manchin’s case he’s condemning white poor people as well. Certainly he’s denying a number of his own constituents of all races the help they need. West Virginia is a very poor state.
Evan Osnos at the New Yorker wrote this:
Manchin never budged from an unreconstructed conservative talking point: give Americans too much help, such as extended unemployment insurance, and they will be indolent and dependent. All over West Virginia, he told me, businesses “can’t find workers. They won’t come back to work.” Dispensing with the euphemisms a few months later, he told reporters, “I cannot accept our economy, or basically our society, moving towards an entitlement mentality.”
The active ingredients in Manchin’s political calculus have never been a great mystery: he is a Democrat aiming to get reëlected in an increasingly Republican state, and he is among the Senate’s largest recipients of campaign cash from the coal, oil, and gas industries, which have lobbied against the climate-change provisions in the bill he scuttled. But, to the West Virginians who begged him to support the anti-poverty programs in the Build Back Better bill, his rejection reflects a fundamental seclusion from the needs of people which he is no longer willing or able to perceive.
To such critics in the state, Manchin has become an icon of Washington oligarchy and estrangement, a politician with a personal fortune, whose blockade against programs that have helped his constituents escape poverty represents a sneering disregard for the gap between their actual struggles and his televised bromides.
If Manchin’s opposition holds, his vote will be decisive in ending the expanded Child Tax Credit program, which, according to the Treasury Department, last week delivered payments benefitting three hundred and five thousand children in West Virginia. Statewide, ninety-three per cent of children are eligible for the credit, tied for the highest rate in the country. Analysts estimate that, if the program is allowed to expire, at the end of the month, fifty thousand children there will be in danger of falling into poverty. The average payment per family: four hundred and forty-six dollars a month.
Manchin is especially vulnerable to accusations of imperial remove. Photos that circulated online show him chatting over the rail of his houseboat in Washington with angry constituents, who had arrived by kayak. After he persuaded the Biden Administration to drop from the bill the Clean Electricity Performance Program, the centerpiece of efforts to slash greenhouse-gas emissions, climate protesters surrounded Manchin’s silver Maserati.
Jim McKay, the director of Prevent Child Abuse West Virginia, a nonprofit organization that lobbied Manchin to support the bill, told me that the senator was “conspicuously absent” from “personal meetings with West Virginia families.” McKay said, “Unfortunately, while his staff did have some meetings—which we are thankful to have had—personal contacts with Senator Manchin were extremely limited.” Dodging uncomfortable meetings is not unique in politics, but the accusation carries a special sting for Manchin, whose status as a Democrat in a red state makes him especially keen to project an image of a man who refuses to “go Washington.” McKay said, “I look forward to when Senator Manchin reconnects with average people.”
To anyone who knows the details, Manchin’s self-narrative—of a coal-country football star from the tiny town of Farmington—has always passed over his wealth and status. The Manchins are machers; Joe’s grandfather ran Farmington’s grocery store and served, over the years, as its fire chief, constable, justice of the peace, and mayor. His father had a similar stature in local politics, while also expanding the family business from groceries into furniture and carpets. Joe, for his part, has prospered as a coal broker, building a net worth of between four and thirteen million dollars, according to his Senate disclosures. In West Virginia terms, Manchin has been a member of the gentry—corporate, political, and personal—for decades.
Now he is the most powerful man in the US Congress who believes not only that he has the right to dictate his ideology to the entire country but he can also make moral judgments about poor peopleMas he denies food to the children of his state. What a guy.
Manchin is betraying his own constituents whom he clearly believes are a bunch of lazy miscreants. And yet, 93% of the state’s children qualify for this tax credit. Does he think those kids are lazy criminals too? Or does going hungry in their childhood make them honest hard workers when they grow up? Certainly Joe Manchin didn’t ever go hungry as a child. What does that make him?
His attitude is one that many people in this country hold. They believe that since they aren’t going hungry that there’s no reason anyone else should either. In fact, it’s a sign that these poor people are trying to take something from them if they need support. It’s a vestige of the Protestant work ethic which, in today’s majority religious communities, has morphed into the prosperity gospel. It’s an ugly, selfish philosophy of life. Joe Manchin in one of its avatars.
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