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Lyric Hughes Hale's avatar

From the viewpoint of many of us in the Midwest, totally not surprising and I think overkill to say that this is the end of the world as we know it. Manchin already voted for more than $5T in new spending in the last ten months. A lot of disconnect between what some perceive as governmental overreach in DC and underperformance locally, where crime is out of control in many high-tax cites--I live in Chicago. Climate change is really all about energy, and based upon corporate and investor sustainability goals, clean tech innovations will continue with or without the government. Long term, demographics rules all and fewer people and slower growth in coming decades will make our current levels of debt unsustainable. There is no acceptable level of inflation that can make that problem go away. And now a new round of Covid could mean fiscal support will be needed to help those affected. So not a disaster, but perhaps a time to reassess priorities and realistically survey what the American people want-and can afford.

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Hubert Horan's avatar

This was always the endgame. Anyone who could not see this coming has been ignoring months of clear evidence.

Part of the plan was always to drag the "negotiations" out as long ago to expose the fact that top-level Democrats were always willing to sell out the promises they made to voters. Part of the plan was to get Biden, Schumer and the rest of the Dem establishment to focus all their energy on destroying the possibility that Dems that cared about the infrastructure bill (and voting rights, the climate, etc) could mount any countervailing pressure on belalf of those things. Part of the plan was to make sure that the establishment Dems never pointed out the massive corporate funding behind Manchin and Sinema's gamesmanship and the MSM narratives about "centrism" and that legislation that clearly had majority popular support "went too far:

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