F%$# Joe Manchin

It appears that Joe Manchin's objections to continuing the child tax credit, he literally said that the thought that the money would be spent on drugs, has resulted in a 41% increase in child poverty.

The cruelty is the point:

The number of American children in poverty spiked dramatically in January after the expiration of President Biden’s expanded child benefit at the end of last year, according to new research released on Thursday.

The Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University said that the child poverty rate rose from 12 percent in December 2021 to 17 percent last month, an approximately 41 percent increase. The study found that an additional 3.7 million children are now in poverty relative to the end of December, with Black and Latino children seeing the biggest percentage point increases.

………

But the White House was unable to secure an extension of the program amid a disagreement over its broader economic proposal with Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.), who raised multiple objections to the child benefit and said it was discouraging parents from working. Virtually all Republicans have also opposed Biden’s expanded Child Tax Credit, and Washington has shifted away from pandemic spending as lawmakers seek to curb the worst inflationary spike in four decades.

The expiration of the program now threatens to undermine what White House officials had seen as a potential legacy achievement for the president. Instead, the number of children in poverty went from roughly 8.9 million in December 2021 to 12.6 million last month.

The fetish that the "Very Serious People" inside the beltway have with punitive cruelty, it is seen as a proxy for gravitas, it literally killing us.