On Friday’s “PBS NewsHour,” New York Times columnist David Brooks stated that Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) “turned out to be 100% right” about inflation while “other Democrats, turned out to be 100% wrong.” And that you can argue that Manchin stopping Build Back Better from passing “saved the country” from “a very bad policy disaster” and “worse inflation.”
Brooks said, “So, I’m going to do something that’s never been done in a major American TV studio, which is praise Joe Manchin. I went back and looked at some of the news stories from a year ago, and Joe Manchin was warning about inflation back then. And there were all these stories…economists dismiss Manchin inflation fears. Well, he turned out to be 100% right. And, frankly, a lot of us, including me, but all the other Democrats, turned out to be 100% wrong. And you could argue that Joe Manchin stopping the big Build Back Better bill, which was trillions of dollars, if we had poured that additional trillions of dollars into the economy, a lot of it unfunded, then inflation would be truly terrible. And so, you could argue Joe Manchin saved the country and the Democratic Party a very bad policy disaster. And so, I think he deserves some credit for being right about that and for being super attuned to the inflation fears, which are the number one issue in the country right now.”
He continued, “The one part I’ll disagree with him is just because there’s inflation doesn’t mean you can’t have government policy. And so, if you pay for — if you take some money out of the economy through taxes, and then pay for it — for climate change legislation, it’s not necessarily inflationary. But some of the people who are now bashing him should be thanking him for some of the things he did earlier to warn us about this and to forestall worse inflation.”
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