Joe Manchin whines about $3.5 trillion — but he spent $9.1 trillion on defense

Whether President Biden's agenda fails at this point depends on two people: Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.). Earlier this week, Sinema appeared the more immovable obstacle. On Wednesday, Manchin made it clear he's still in the running for that infamous crown.

"I can't support $3.5 trillion more in spending when we have already spent $5.4 trillion since last March," he wrote in a statement apparently ruling out any new programs whatsoever. "[S]pending trillions more on new and expanded government programs, when we can't even pay for the essential social programs, like Social Security and Medicare, is the definition of fiscal insanity," Manchin said.

This is a complete crock, as Manchin's own actions prove: For years, he has been casually voting for bloated defense budgets many times the size of the Biden agenda. His squalling about overspending is dishonest nonsense, and he is utterly wrong about what America can afford.

Traditionally, media coverage of government programs covers the estimated 10-year cost, because that's what the Congressional Budget Office typically publishes. Sometimes there are deviations from this rule — the genuinely enormous pandemic relief bills, for instance, were described by their one-year cost. Manchin is conveniently conflating the two metrics, as Eric Levitz explains at New York:

The one institution that habitually gets the one-year treatment is the military, because troop worship is virtually mandatory in the American mainstream press, and 10-year budgets would be risk public backlash. So let's redress that unfairness, and treat the Defense Department as the Biden agenda has been treated. Let's see exactly how much "fiscal insanity" Manchin routinely supports.

Estimates of the defense budget vary between the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), but for convenience's sake let me use the BEA figures. (We only need ballpark accuracy for the argument.) By this measure, total federal spending on defense consumption and investment in 2020 was $881 billion. Assuming that will be static over 10 years (and it won't be) gives us a 10-year figure of $8.8 trillion. That's almost certainly an underestimate, however, because Congress keeps compulsively stuffing more money into the Pentagon — the House just added $24 billion to the 2022 military budget though Biden didn't ask for it and we just ended a major war.