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Sen. Manchin Responds To Pressure From Dems To Spend More Money

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OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.


West Virginia Democratic Senator Joe Manchin is going after his party again. During an interview on MSNBC, left-wing host Stephanie Ruhle tried pushing Manchin on why he won’t support radical proposals.

Ruhle kicked the segment off by asking Manchin: “When is the last time you spoke to Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Progressive members of the Senate to work on this?”

After saying he speaks to them every Monday on a conference call, Manchin said:

I am not a liberal by any stretch of the imagination, and not a conservative, ultra-conservative. I tell people, I am fiscally responsible, socially compassionate. Put me anywhere you want in the political spectrum, I am centrist in the middle where most are, pragmatic enough to figure I understand, you identified the need on this side.

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We already spent how many trillions of dollars attending to a lot of the needs. How much more can we afford. You want more debt. I looked this morning, we’re at $28.5 trillion of debt. How much more can we add on and pass onto your children, the next generation? We’ve always said, we’re writing checks our kids can’t cash and it is a shame to put the burden. Let’s consider that.

Ruhle then doubled down again and asked about Democrats accusing him of “standing in the way of President Biden’s agenda.”

She was trying to bait Manchin into saying he’d support Democrats’ radical bills, but he didn’t fall for it.

“I hear from like you said, I hear from everybody, I get attacked from different sides. Also, we get some praise from different sides trying to take a pragmatic, centrist approach. People are concerned about the debt, nobody is speaking about the debt. We have a tremendous amount of debt that could cause inflation,” Manchin said.

“You understand the financial market and understand it as well as anybody, what we are teetering with here. Let’s get this right. We already put close to $6 trillion out to people. Our economy is coming back, comes roaring back,” he added.

“Now we’re not able to meet demand by supplying what the economy wants. The demand says give me more workers, more products. We’re having a hard time. If you do another 2, 3, $4 trillion, we may have a hard time with the tax code, adjustments I believe need to be made. I didn’t vote in 2017 for the tax code, I thought it was weighted for the wealthy,” he added.

Manchin concluded: “I didn’t think the average working person got their due share. Let’s make some adjustments. On the other hand, we’re in a global market, not isolationist, never going to be isolationist. We have to be in the global market and lead the world. If you’re going to do that, you better be competitive. Can’t be out of the realm of not being competitive, people want to invest or come to your country or manufacture here.”

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WATCH:

The White House quickly reversed course after President Joe Biden said the administration would be working to shutter coal-fired power plants amid an energy crisis following a rebuke from a leading Democrat from a coal-producing state.

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“I was in Massachusetts about a month ago on the site of the largest old coal plant in America. Guess what? It cost them too much money,” Biden said during an event in Carlsbad, Calif., on Friday. “No one is building new coal plants because they can’t rely on it, even if they have all the coal guaranteed for the rest of the existence of the plant. So it’s going to become a wind generation.”

“And all they’re doing is, it’s going to save them a hell of a lot of money, and using the same transmission line that they transmitted the coal-fired electric on, we’re going to be shutting these plants down all across America and having wind and solar power,” Biden pledged.

In response, Sen. Joe Manchin, a moderate Democrat from the coal-reliant red state of West Virginia, said that view is “outrageous” and “divorced from reality.”

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