Democrats are responding in typical fashion to the promise from Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., to vote “no” on President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better Act: They are foaming at the mouth.
According to Rep. Jamaal Bowman, D-NY, “It’s an example of Joe Manchin, as a white man, showing that he doesn’t care about black people, he doesn’t care about Latinos, he doesn’t care about immigrants, he doesn’t care about women, and he doesn’t care about the poor.”
Bowman echoed Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo.: “Joe Manchin’s opposition to the Build Back Better Act is anti-black, anti-child, anti-woman, and anti-immigrant.”
Joe Manchin does not get to dictate the future of our country. pic.twitter.com/aG7zBuyMQy
— Congresswoman Cori Bush (@RepCori) November 1, 2021
So, Manchin is a racist, xenophobe, misogynist, and a plutocrat. Congratulations, Senator. You won the Wokistani superfecta!
Manchin, his foes claim, imperils democracy itself.
MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan warns, “Manchin is killing the Biden legislative agenda, and perhaps the future of American democracy too.” Columnist Jennifer Rubin of The Washington Post left no hair unyanked: “Democracy is hanging by a thread.”
None of the Left’s spittle-flecked hyperventilation explains why Joe Manchin finally spurned BBB:
It stinks.
This monstrosity is too immense, too costly, and too hyperactive. If BBB were a human being, it would need to be duct-taped to a chair and drowned in tranquilizers.
BBB drones on for 2,466 pages, equivalent to 15 copies of the Benediction Classics edition of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.
Among randomly chosen items, BBB addresses ‘‘wildland-urban interface,” “energy savings estimates that accrue to low-income households,” “acquisition, design, and construction of a Great Lakes heavy icebreaker,” “qualified clean hydrogen production,” “Body and spa treatments,” and much, much, much more.
Biden absurdly declared on September 25 that “My Build Back Better Agenda costs zero dollars.”
This is exactly $1.75 trillion below congressional Democrats’ sticker price. They, in turn, fake this figure by claiming that BBB’s “life-changing provisions”—as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. dubs them—soon would expire.
Now, would Pelosi plant a grove of shade trees at her Napa Valley vineyard and schedule them for extraction between 2022 and 2027?
No.
Regardless, Democrats sponsored child tax credits, Daycare for All, Obamacare subsidies, and other socialist goodies and argued that they would vanish in one to six years. This disinformation helped Democrats construct the bright, shining lie that BBB would cost “only” $1.75 trillion.
Thankfully, Senator Lindsey Graham, R-SC, and Rep. Jason Smith, R-Mo., asked the Congressional Budget Office to score BBB without Democrats’ Bernie Madoff-style accounting fraud.
CBO’s honest numbers forecast BBB’s 10-year cost: $4.73 trillion. This is 270% of its phony, official price tag. This staggering sum exceeds the inflation-adjust price of World War II, which Manchin estimates at $4.5 trillion.
BBB also would bbboost the national debt by $3 trillion. This is light years from Biden’s lie that his bill “adds zero dollars to the national debt.”
BBB should be rechristened Build Bankruptcy Better and condemned as a Superfund site amid November’s 6.8% year-on-year inflation rate, the highest since June 1982.
BBB is also a Pandora’s box teeming with far-Left vipers and viruses.
Among them:
- $1.7 billion in payouts to local newspapers. Buh-bye, objectivity!
- $2.5 billion in subsidies for trial attorneys who file contingency lawsuits.
- $80 billion to deploy 86,852 brand-new IRS agents to squeeze every conceivable dime from taxpayers with annual incomes as low as $25,000.
- A Civilian Climate Corps would unleash 300,000 busybodies to hector Americans into “greener” lives.
- Pricier childcare, due to proposed regulations that babysitters be paid, equal to elementary school teachers.
- Universal pre-Kindgarten, all the better to brainwash children with Critical Race Theory, gender confusion, and sexy thoughts at ages 3 and 4 rather than 5 or 6.
One need not be a rich white guy who hates blacks, women, and poor people to ponder all of this and yell, “Hell No!”
As for Sen. Joe Manchin, he is guilty of only this: His eyes are wide open.
Deroy Murdock is a Manhattan-based Fox News Contributor, a contributing editor with National Review Online, and a senior fellow with the London Center for Policy Research. Aaron Cichon contributed research to this opinion piece.
