It might appear he did in a effort to NOT have his state use money in the Biden Stimulus/Rescue Law. for tax cuts…
Oooops?!
Did he just lose his Right leaners halo?
Oh, and the piece below says the states actually will get OVERPAID in the final adjustment to Manchin’s error….
In trying to prevent his own state from using federal aid funds to expand its planned tax cut, Senator Joe Manchin may have turned the American Rescue Plan into a legal mess. One of the major expenditures in the law is $350 billion for state, local, and territorial governments, including about $200 billion for states alone. Manchin, aware of ongoing tax reform efforts in his own state, as well as others, wanted a provision inserted that barred states from using these relief funds to pay for tax cuts.
But here’s the thing: a strict reading of the provision in question would suggest that it prevents states from doing a wide range of things, including uncontroversial reforms or changes to plans that had already passed. That’s probably not what Manchin intended. But the provision, which prevents states from using relief funds to “directly or indirectly” offset reductions in net tax revenues might have that effect. The provision was likely phrased this way because state funds are fungible, and a ban on using relief funds “directly” to offset revenue reductions could easily be circumvented. Yet including the word “indirectly” creates far more issues than it solves. …
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Ironically, the Manchin provision is also somewhat of an admission of how unnecessary the massive amount of state and local aid was. Such a cash infusion may have been justified had states lost an average of 8 percent of revenue as initially feared, but their revenues declined by just 0.4 percent on average. If states were truly desperate for cash, there would be no need to prevent them from putting federal aid towards tax cuts.
This episode, no matter how it turns out, will go down as a failure of policymaking. Even if states ignore Manchin’s provision, or Congress moves ahead with Senator Mike Braun’s effort to repeal it, government officials will have spent valuable time interpreting or litigating this unnecessary hurdle instead of delivering relief to American taxpayers…
image…Greg Nash