I'm going to leave the political analysis for others. I do not know the reasons why Senator Joe Manchin has decided to retract an explicit promise made to President Joe Biden. I naively believed that, even in this time of violation of the rules, respecting a treatment that has just been done would be one of the latest rules to get lost, since the reputation of maintaining the word given is useful even to the most cynical politicians. Nor do I know what can be saved, if something can be saved, from the plan to rebuild better. What I know is that human and, certainly economic costs will be huge if the driving plans of Biden, moderate but crucial, not They come to fruition. Not to approve a decent social program would mean condemning millions of American children to have poor health and low income when they are adults, because that is what happens when it grows in poverty. It would also mean to condemn other million to inadequate medical assistance and economic ruin if they get sick, because that is what happens when people do not have medical insurance in conditions. Many people would be condemned to suffering from diseases that could already avoid premature death due to air pollution, even taking into account that the danger of a climatic catastrophe would be greater. All this are not conjectures. There is a huge amount of evidence that, when they reach adulthood, children of low -income families who receive financial aid are much healthier and are more productive than those who did not receive it. Americans without insurance often do not have access to the necessary medical care and face unassumable invoices. And there are studies that show that policies to mitigate climate change will also bring great health benefits thanks to the fact that, in the next decade, the air will be cleaner. In subsection mode, it is not clear how many Americans are aware of even What point we are falling behind with respect to other countries in terms of satisfaction of basic human needs. I still find people who believe we have the highest life expectancy in the world, when the reality is that we can expect to live between three and five years less than the citizens of most European countries. And, by the way, also among the states of the country there are increasing differences. In 1979, life expectancy in Western Virginia was just about 14 months younger than in New York; In 2016, the gap had expanded six years. There is no doubt that Manchin's native state would benefit immensely from the social spending that the Democratic senator seems determined to prevent. The weakness of the US Social Protection Network also has economic consequences. It is true that our GDP per capita is still high, but this is largely due to the fact that Americans take much less vacations than people take in other countries, which means they produce more because they work more hours. In other aspects we are lagging behind. Even before the pandemic, an American in his best years as a worker was less likely to be work active than his peers in Canada and many European countries, surely in part because we do not help adults to remain integrated into the active population by providing nurseries and paternity permits. But, can we allow ourselves to improve our lives? One answer is that other rich countries seem to fix them very well. Another is that Manchin's objections to the proposed legislation lose strength when they undergo a thorough examination. Manchin said that the Congress Budget Office had determined that the cost of the bill was of “more than 4.5 billion dollars” . And no, it is not so. That figure is the calculation required by the Republicans of the disbursement in the assumption that everything established by the legislation became permanent, which is not what the project says. In addition, if Congress voted in favor of extending programs such as fiscal deduction for a child, I would probably also vote in favor of compensation for the loss of income. The analysis of the current drafting of the law made by the budget office – which concluded that it almost had no effect on the deficit – gives us a much better idea about its probable fiscal repercussions that this romantic hypothesis. Manchin's statement that we have a «overwhelming» national debt, perhaps it is worth noting that federal interest payments as a percentage of GDP ascend only in half that at the time of Ronald Reagan, and that if they fit inflation, They are basically zero. And what about inflation? The expenditure proposed in rebuilding better is distributed over several years, so it would not have a lot of impact on the increase in short -term general demand; The first year, its contribution to the deficit would be only 0.6% of GDP, which is not enough to influence the price increase. On the other hand, the Federal Reserve has just made it clear that it is prepared to raise interest rates if inflation does not refer, so that the influence of public spending should be even less. The letter published by the senator to explain why he said what he said in Fox News does not seem a carefully elaborate political statement; It doesn't even seem like a coherent ideological manifesto. In fact, it would be said that he wrote it in a hurry, gathering a blight of Republican conversation issues taken out of any way in an attempt to justify his sudden treason and present himself as a victim. I feel, but no. The victim of this story is the United States, and not a senator who has to carry the consequences of having broken a promise. Paul Krugman is a Nobel Prize in Economics. © The New York Times, 2021. News clips translation
