During an interview with CBS’s “The Takeout” podcast released on Friday, Sen. Joe Manchin (I-WV) said that the 17 Nobel laureates that the Biden administration used to justify spending in the American Rescue Plan were “17 educated idiots” who told the Biden administration what it wanted to hear because the administration “paid them.”
Manchin stated that [relevant remarks begin around 12:05] inflation, immigration, and Afghanistan were the biggest blind spots of the Biden administration and the Harris campaign and addressed inflation first by stating, “I warned of that, and I got criticized, as you recall, they told me they had 17 Nobel laureates.”
He added that both parties sent out stimulus checks under the Trump presidency and said that we didn’t do that during the Great Depression, but the pandemic was an unknown situation, where “you couldn’t do something, you weren’t supposed to go anywhere. That was a mistake, we found out later, but we erred on the [side] of caution. … And then, by the time it was over and the election was over in 2020…we had put $3.2 trillion in mostly — all in a bipartisan way. Joe Biden gets elected, comes in, I say something on the floor when I hear they want to do the American Rescue Plan and want to go [through] reconciliation.”
He further stated, “Remember when I stopped and it shut down for about eight or ten hours? That’s because they were extending unemployment benefits and we had a vaccine that worked. And I told him then, I said, you’ve got a vaccine that’s working, you’ve got people that have got money because we sent a check to everybody, and if we didn’t send a check, it was by mistake, because you tried to send a check to everybody, and I said, and they’ve got nowhere to go now, they’ve been cloistered in their home…and they’re going to go out there and find out…the supply chain’s been weak, things were shut down, they’re going to be paying — I want this, I’ll pay whatever price I can to get it, and they’re going to inflate it. You’ve got inflation coming at you hard when you do this, and now you’re still keeping people out of the workforce because you’re going to give them an extension clear up until October 2021 of unemployment benefits and they can’t go back and can’t be threatened to lose their unemployment benefits. You’ve got a perfect storm hitting you. … That’s when they threw out the 17 Nobel laureates, and I said, you’ve got 17 educated idiots that are telling you what you want to hear because you paid them.”
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