Sen. Kyrsten Sinema has agreed to support the latest version of Joe Biden's spending bill, but only if . . .
. . . the provision that places limits on the carried interest loophole is removed.
All I can do is laugh at this point. The CIL is now officially the cockroach of tax law. If you tossed a nuclear bomb at the entire tax code, it's the one thing that would survive. When the world ends, hedge fund bros will crawl out of the ashes, throw their fists to the sky, and laugh at the fools who thought they could take away their beloved carried interest.
Anyway, Democrats are now on the verge of passing a $400 billion spending bill. Hooray, I guess, but less than a year ago Sen. Joe Manchin (and probably Sinema too) were willing to pass a $1.5 trillion bill. If Dems had just gone along with that instead of playing endless stupid games, they would have gotten a lot more and they would have gotten it a lot sooner.
But they didn't. So $400 billion it is.
Hilarious/disgusting that CIL is Sinema's bright line.
What a piece of work.
She used to be amazing. Now she's just a whore for $$$.
Especially galling to us, as we donated to her here in AZ for her very first campaign.
She always was a shallow trendspotter & trendhopper.
She's just an Arizona Beastie Girl, the MCA of the Senate.
Man, I hope Sinema is primaried out. Beyond her politics, then I won't have to see her 'outfit of the day' pictures anymore. What a fashion nightmare.
It would be funnier if Sinema is the 2024 Democrat nominee for AZ Senate but loses to the GQP candidate by fewer than the total of votes for the G.R.E.E.N.* Party candidate.
*Getting Republiqans Elected Every November
Perfect acronym.
Except Manchin was only really willing to back that $1.5 trillion deal for the 8 hours between when he agreed to it with Schumer and the second his lobbyists whispered in his ear.
Having gotten off of the Manchin Special Snowflake Express with any climate bill at all is a miracle. High fives!
These are my beliefs also. Manchin went out of his way to shoot down the $1.5 B bill by going on Fox News to announce it.
" If Dems had just gone along with that instead of playing endless stupid games, they would have gotten a lot more and they would have gotten it a lot sooner.
But they didn't. So $400 billion it is."
Thus convincing the base that they are actually tried, but without passing a bill that would cause the inflation to get out of hand. Pure genius.
I haven't decided whether this is sarcastic or not.
Dude, Larry god damned Summers himself said the investments in the bill were set up to lower inflation because they'd increase the size of pie not stuff it too full so that it blows up. Not passing the bill made inflation worse.
In this Portland kombucha bar, Larry is still ex-Angeleno Mac Lean Stephenson, not ex-Harvardman Summers, but they do know this: the Democrats climate change shellgame will not only not save the planet, it also won't save any money.
https://youtu.be/VAYPNF4aIf0
False premise.
Sinema and Manchin were not going to support the $1.5 trillion dollar package. They were looking for excuses to honor promises made to lobbyists. They might have supported more than $400 billion individually but never both of them.
The only reason Sinema is backing this proposal is that Manchin's surprise deal backed her into a corner.
Manchin only backed the surprise deal he literally wrote himself because he was in danger of losing not just his gavel but also his committee assignment.
And, at no point prior to now would Manchin have written out the actual deal he supported. He was constantly saying, "Write it differently and I'll consider it."
"Hooray, I guess, but less than a year ago Sen. Joe Manchin (and probably Sinema too) were willing to pass a $1.5 trillion bill."
Assumes Manchin was telling the truth about being willing to pass a $1.5T bill, for which the only evidence is his word (which is to say about as worthwhile as Lucy when she tells Charlie Brown she wants to play football), and that Sinema didn't see a butterfly and follow it until she got lost on her way to the Senate that morning.
Also, the goal here wasn't to pass $1.5T in spending. It was to accomplish specific goals. So if the Sinechin duo was willing to pass $1.5T in spending on, I don't know, more coal power plants and tax cuts for hedge fund bros, it's not like that "deal" would've been worth passing... just to get a headline "Dems Pass $1.5T Bill" in the papers.
You make Sinema sound like a flower child. She doesn't follow butterflies; she only follows the money.
How do you know what her motivations are? As I've tried to state repeatedly, few of us know basic details of huge historical events, but we're apparently all psychic when it comes to legislators.
ALL you know is that she opposed a bill in one form and accepted it in another. You've no idea what her actual thinking was.
As has been pointed out below, it's not at all clear that the tradeoff that was apparently forced is a BAD tradeoff for the US as a whole...
She's a political hipster. In the late 90s, early aughts, as a Yung Barrister fresh out of school, it was socially advantageous in the circles she ran in to be a bothsidesing Naderite, but as she rose the ranks of office, she saw that a more iconoclastic Mc Cainiac maverickiness would serve better. She just does what she does to try to stay cool.
CIL survives thanks to Sinema, but as a result, it was replaced by a new 1% tax on stock buy-backs. Eliminating CIL repeal cost us $14B, but the 1% tax should raise $72B.
https://www.npr.org/2022/08/04/1115841297/sinema-says-she-will-move-forward-with-senate-democrats-climate-health-and-tax-b
So did Sinema do good or bad?
By the way, I like the sound of the "1% tax".
Interesting. Almost sounds like it was a briar patch - "Please please don't make me ditch the $14B CIL, and force me instead to accept a buyback tax that will raise 5x the amount of money and maybe even do a bit of social good!"
The CIL is an abomination, but I doubt it does a lot of economic harm besides the loss of revenue. I guess it probably incentivizes smart people to get into dubious financial games rather than do something useful. But I think that making stock buybacks less attractive is a very good thing indeed.
So did Sinema do good or bad?
Clearly an improvement: remember, the CIL wasn't going to be eliminated in any event, but just curbed.
There is literally no reason to think the Democrats were ever close to inking a 1.5 T spending bill.
Almost all Democrats in the House and 48 in the Senate (plus Harris) would have passed the $1.5T bill. That actually was close. It didn't pass because two Senators refused to go along. Failure to pass was not the fault of "Democrats".
Moreover, had the entire Republican Party not checked out and gone AWOL, Manchinema (Syneman?) might have been irrelevant. Don't forgot: half the Senate is currently made up of do-nothing, stop-everything drones.
This. It maddens me that everyone assumes, rightly, that all the Republican lawmakers are worthless. Any real problem must be dealt with by Democrats. The Republicans are a legislative black hole. Why do they not pay a price for this? They have power. They have an opportunity to do something on behalf of their country. They choose to work against the interest of their country. Half or the country, or half of the country for electoral purposes, cheers them on. And in the media this gets negligible mention. It is assumed. Republicans solving real problems, as opposed to creating them, is as expected as covid fighting cancer. They make the news when they actually do something pro-social. Maddening.
Right. And the IRA is a prime example. I can't be the only one who was thinking: would it really be impossible (if Sinema is shaky) to get someone like Susan Collins on board for a bill that pushes decarbonization and reduce the deficit?
Every last Republican in both chambers is clearly terrified of the danger of getting primaried.
Sen. Sinema wants to be known as the Senator who saved carried interest? Really?
Not that it matters, but carried interests are not just done in the land of hedge funds.
They are also routinely done in, wait for it ......., real estate investment funds of all sorts.
Just the sort of thing that is rather commonplace in high, dare I say, crazy, development places like Arizona.
So sometimes the answer is obvious.
I am in the camp that I would never complain about Manchin. He's from West Virginia, for God's sake. You're not getting anyone else with a D after their name from there, and he's been worth it alone for the judge appointments. I'm OK with his fellow D's complaining about him if it's theater that helps him get reelected.
But Sinema? I do not understand her at all, and I've got to believe there is someone else who can still get elected in Arizona who's far less objectionable than she is. I would love to see her primaried.
I'd love to see at least 2 more D's in the Senate to make both less relevant, but we'd be in a much worse place with a return of a Majority Leader McConnell.
This.
When Manchin finally retires or is defeated, Democrats aren't holding that seat. Nor, should I add, is a Susan Collins-type going to be his replacement. It'll be a dead-eyed, true believing Tom Cotton clone.
But Arizona is clearly lot bluer than WV. If Sinema is successfully primaried by a high quality Democratic candidate, her seat should be winnable in the general election.
She needs to go. She's just too undependable and flaky.
Well I think that the CIL provision was specifically placed in the legislation to be removed. It was Sinema bait - the item she could draw a red line on, to demonstrate that she pushed back on The Squad et. al., while then turning around and supporting the main bill.
That's very possible.
Amen,
Agreed. And drought relief too.
With or without the carried interest loophole closure, is there any guarantee that Always on Camera & her krew will support this legislation?
Last year Manchin wrote quite a passionate condemnation of the CIL, calling on his colleagues to get rid of it. I'm not convinced passage of this bill is all over bar the shouting; there's plenty of scope for prima donnas to screw things up during the floor votes on amendments.
. If Dems had just gone along with that instead of playing endless stupid games, they would have gotten a lot more and they would have gotten it a lot sooner.,/i>
Really? Does it make any sense logically for the party to agree amongst themselves on a $1.5 trillion package and then for, I don't know, maybe for the hell of it? Decide to blow up the deal and come back a year later for $400 billion? Hmmm?
There was no deal. This is the deal, like it or not. This is what ultimately Manchin and Symena will agree to assuming nothing blows this up either.
Boy I didn't realize Arizona had so many hedge fund managers as Wisconsin has dairy farmers or Texas oil workers. Amazing!
I care about the welfare of the country.
You have parochial interests.
She is a tool of the lobbyists.
If I were a senator, I would have given a handout to big pharma before saving hedge fund freaks. It’s not even a close moral comparison. Even the opioid pushers are better than private equity looters. Close call on that comparison, but moderna and Pfizer did make a useful product anyway.
And, to make this personal, which one is giving Mr. Drum a longer life? Pharma scientists or greedy hedge fund bro?
That is bullshit and you know it. Manchin shot down the bill the same day after talking with lobbyist buddies. You are such a Kevin.
Just adding one here to the "what are you talking about, Manchin and Sinema were never going along with the $1.5T bill" chorus. I don't know what mirror universe in which that was supposedly happening.
Kevin: the only person in America (except a few Serious Thinkers in the MSM) who still believes Manchin and Sinema would have agreed to 1.5 trillion.
The Dems motto should be: Perfectum est semper pugnare cum bono …