Paid Stupidity

Joe Manchin has regrets:

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 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.”

You get what you pay for...