Joe vs. Joe

Joe Manchin just played Joe Biden. Again. Now it’s time for Joe Biden to fight back.

The two Joes feuding over the future of the country.

While Joe Biden was dapping despots in the Middle East, Joe Manchin spent last weekend destroying the president’s domestic agenda. 

Local politics have nationalized over the past decade — COVID lockdowns and critical race theory dominate school board elections and city council races. But international politics is national, too. Biden’s hobnobbing with foreign dictators all comes back to what he can’t seem to do back home: anything about the price of gas. 

For the second time in as many years, Joe Manchin has used his position as the fulcrum vote in the Senate to destroy the domestic agenda of a president from his own party. He walked away from yearlong talks on climate legislation and an international minimum corporate tax, claiming that “inflation is my greatest concern.” 

But it’s not actually about inflation. If it was, Manchin would be supporting the legislation. Right now, major American corporations like Google and Apple avoid paying taxes by headquartering in Ireland, a country with lower corporate tax rates. That creates an international race to the bottom. Countries around the world race to lower their corporate taxes to get a smaller and smaller bite of a bigger pie. For the last year, Janet Yellen and the Biden administration have been pushing to end this downward spiral by instituting an international minimum corporate tax. The tax would establish a tax floor of 15%. It would also tax corporations according to where they sell a product, not where they’re headquartered.