Manchin’s Right This Time - April 17, 2022

 I have to admit that Senator Joe Manchin’s complaints are spot on this time. 

I agree with Manchin’s fiscal conservatism, his grave concern for the extreme rate our national debt is increasing, and his concerns over inflation. I will explain in turn. 

But, first, I must come clean on one matter. 

Honest Joe Manchin’s Achilles heel is big oil and coal. He made his private sector fortune as a coal broker in West Virginia. One cannot look at those dugout hills and hollows and not have some sympathy for those who work extracting that dirty fossil fuel. They are desperate for jobs and the only future they have in those bleak economies. A coal miner living in a shotgun house on the family property doesn’t much have the luxury of worrying about rising tides in Miami and New York City, or forest fires in California, or for that matter, the tide that raises and lowers Manchin’s yacht each day.

Our regard for the environment is a luxury good, and it’s not a luxury too many West Virginians can afford. Manchin is as tied to the bleak future of fossil fuels as a fifth generation coal miner, but obviously in the lap of luxury, on his D.C. yacht. 

With that set of blinders, Manchin can’t buy into any plan that has a reasonable chance to transition us to a sustainable economy, as efficient as it may be. 

His personal angle is such a shame, though, when it frustrates his other instincts. More than any other, he articulates the need to come to grips with runaway spending. Instead of fiscal policy that saves for a rainy day, D.C. spends like it is raining cats and dogs every day, no matter how blue are the skies. This “spend in bad times, and spend in good times” is incredibly bad economic policy, especially if we don’t want to leave for our children a pile of debt to the moon. 

I don’t make that analogy mildly. Already we are approaching a level of debt that would stack ten dollar bills almost all the way to the moon. That’s twice as high as it was just a few presidents ago. But, no worries, I guess. Most of us will be long gone when that debt is crushing our children and grandchildren. 

Manchin also understands the need to coordinate economic policy to stuff inflation back into Pandora’s Box, to join its pals, war and pestilence. Inflation robs us all, although some of us can raise our rates, boards may raise our salaries, or have unions that may at least partially raise our wages. Who is mostly hurt are those already living on the edges of our economy - retirees on fixed income and people earning close to the minimum wage and living paycheck to paycheck. Presumably, a lot of West Virginians on disability pay are also hurt by inflation. 

I am generally a big fan of the Federal Reserve, but Manchin is rightly critical of the Fed’s very slow start on inflation fighting. He knows politics. The Fed can act independently except when it comes time to renew terms. President Biden decided to maintain the status quo. Steady hand on the helm, all that stuff. But, the ship’s sinking. The trouble with normal is it often gets worse. 

Manchin also rightfully resisted piling pork into a pair of badly needed infrastructure bills. We desperately need to rebuild the electric grid, and our bridges and roads are falling apart. We need networks of charging stations and more electric vehicles, and commercial solar and wind will revolutionize energy affordability. These needs should not depend on whether we did all this with union jobs or not, and we must stop throwing bones at people we expect will reelect politicians. Biden and Trump sent trillions in largesse to buy people’s votes under the phony economic theory that they’d spend it and that would repair the economy.

Many of these policies are ridiculous. The Paycheck Protection Program mostly went to deep pockets, and the system was rife with fraud to an extent that likely dwarfs any government program to date. Almost as ridiculous is the policy to allow people to defer their student loan payments. By far and away, those who benefit most are those who attended private schools, medical school, and law school. These are our elite, not the person unemployed and unable to pay their modest debt from a public school education. 

These payments were promised to fix a COVID-ridden economy, but their legacy continues even though our unemployment rate is at an almost historical low. Mind you, midterm elections are around the corner. Instead, these cash giveaways drove the price up on stocks, and priced homes out of the reach of their children and grandchildren. These fickle voters then voted Trump out and gave Biden his lowest favorable rating yet. So much for publicly approved bribery. 

But doeth Joe protest too much? If only he can fling off the yoke of the fossil fuels industry. He is a conservative, which should mean one should insist on preserving the world for the next generation, not use resources up today. If only we had a far more balanced energy portfolio all along, we’d not be in the mess we find ourselves in today. Those were the Teddy Roosevelt conservatives who had a genuine passion for the planet. 

If we had a better balanced (i.e., more sustainable) energy policy, or economic policy, or industrial policy, or, heck, any policy at all, we’d probably not be watching Ukraine be razed to ashes. Oil and natural gas does not have a national logo. Russian oil will still get sold, and that gives Russia almost billion dollars of fossil fuel revenue every day from Europe. When we pat ourselves on the back for providing Ukraine with a couple of billion dollars of aid, that’s just a couple of days of Russian oil sales to a fossil fuel hungry world, especially Europe. 

What we need is a thoughtful and consistent and not an opportunistic and malleable set of economic policies. We don’t have many reasoned voices in our body politic any more. Meanwhile, there are issues begging for thoughtful economic policy, and infrastructure investments that have been delayed for far too long, without any end in sight. 

The problem is that presidents typically get only one shot at something big. Obama’s push for the Affordable Care Act hampered him for the rest of his terms of office. Biden’s porked-out first infrastructure bill, which accomplished little except further paving the way for the inflation we suffer today (sorry, Joe, it’s not Putin’s inflation) means we will never see Infrastructure II where the real important economic efficiencies were to be found. 

If only Joe Manchin can come to his senses about fossil fuels someday - when his coal runs out. Meanwhile, I will hope our nation can construct a cohesive set of policies to leave our country in better shape for our children. I’ll keep my fingers crossed, but not too tight. It only hurts.