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Comment by m_ke | Hacker News Reader

It's not partisan, the child tax credit that gives parents $300/month/child that was included in the "American Rescue Plan" expires at the end of the year. [1]

The new infrastructure bill was supposed to include free childcare and other benefits but it's looking like it will get killed by Manchin and Sinema.

[1] "The American Rescue Plan allows families to opt in to receive the monthly payments from July 15 until Dec. 15, 2021." - https://www.forbes.com/advisor/taxes/will-i-receive-the-chil...

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I feel like the wording in your original post was particularly poor though - instead of focusing in on those two as individuals you attributed the issue to democrats as a whole - and also omitted that the bill would also pass quite easily if, say, Rand Paul and Ted Cruz decided to vote for it. You mentioned that it passed due to the previous administration (a republican administration) and was now in danger (under a democratic administration) due to corrupt democrats. It's a guideline on HN to always read things as charitably as possible but the wording here was really really poor and could easily be read as a proposition that the democrats were torpedoing something championed by republicans. Additionally - specifically pulling political parties into the discussion will always make the discourse degrade.

Here's my wording for anyone who can't see it due to it being flagged:

""" *Temporarily, and partially thanks to the previous administration

The infrastructure bill is about to fail due to a few corrupt corporate Democrats. """

It's more than just Sinema and Manchin, that's why I said a few corporate democrats: https://www.businessinsider.com/house-democrats-threaten-hol...

I'm pretty left leaning by American standards and no fan of Trump, but you can't give Biden too much credit for reduction in childhood poverty when it's mostly due to the expanded unemployment benefits that were first before Biden was elected.

I absolutely understand what you were saying and I don't think you're incorrect - I just wanted to highlight that the wording was poorly chosen and could easily be misread. I personally have problems with clear communications myself all the time so I just wanted to provide a bit of feedback as to why it was called out as being flamebait - your core statement wouldn't start a flame war - but the way you said it wasn't the best.

I tried to match the tone of the headline in the article, especially the subtitle: "The Biden administration’s biggest success has not received enough attention".

A lot of people fresh to the political process may not realize that this is a routine thing that happens on both sides of the aisle. For example, Lieberman in 2009 killed the public option[0] for his own party on Obamacare which would have gone a long ways toward forwarding the left's healthcare vision. Later on in 2017, Susan Collins, a Republican, voted to save Obamacare which very likely could have succeeded had she voted with her party[1]

[0]https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/newsletter-art...

[1]https://www.healthreformvotes.org/congress/300025

Another thing that some people don't realize is that this reconciliation bill could be the last attempt at Biden passing any meaningful legislation. If it fails dems are guaranteed to lose seats in the midterms, giving up their slim majority and effectively turning Biden into a lame duck president.

I'm happy to disagree with you on that one. Consider the actual Senate elections[0]. There are 20 R seats up vs 14 D seats. The R side is mathematically on the defense. In addition, if you look at the forecasts, most of the seats are foregone conclusions - we're down to ~5 seats that will be actual contests. This isn't to say one side will or will not win but neither side is likely to get the decisive win that each want.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_United_States_Senate_elec...

I hope you're right but:

1. His approval numbers are tanking https://news.gallup.com/poll/354872/biden-approval-rating-hi...

2. Summer is just ending and we're up to 2000 Americans dying from COVID a day, once cold weather hits the northern states we'll probably see those numbers rise even more.

3. Thanks to the filibuster reconciliation is the only chance democrats have at passing anything through the senate. If the infrastructure deal fails we'll see none of the campaign promises pass.

4. Depending on how China handles Evergrande, there's a decent chance that we'll see the stock market tank in the next 6 months.

As Bernie is getting a bit older he might chose this election to stand down as well - but even if a "republican" won the seat it'd be a VT Republican (maybe even Gov. Scott) so that race might be more interesting than it might appear now - but the conclusion is probably going to be pretty predictably liberal.

Bernie’s an interesting one. He and Warren should have been appointed high seats in the WH but instead had to occupy their senate seats because their governors are Rs (and would have appointed Rs in their vacancies, wrecking the majority). The minute it becomes clear that the spending bill won’t pass, the DNC should shrewdly push the two of them into government positions to galvanize enthusiasm for the 2022 election.

Granted, that requires the DNC to be capable of shrewd moves and I don’t recall the last time the DNC or the RNC actually made a shrewd move.

The last sentence of your GP comment was obviously flamebait. That's what we ask people not to post here. Let's not quibble over what counts as "partisan"—all political flamewar is something we're trying to avoid here.

It was not meant to be flamebait, I'm a democrat and Manchin is clearly a corrupt corporate stooge. Here's an Exxon exec confirming on tape that Manchin is his go to guy and they want the infrastructure deal killed because it would raise corporate taxes: https://youtu.be/xs0xAS2mLtg?t=108

I believe you, but short, intense, name-calling ("corrupt") political battle comments are flamebait. We have to go by effects rather than by intent.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

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