MANCHIN: The Build Back Better way back then was a complete social realignment, everything in order to throw at it, and I was very clear, when the president and I talked, I said, Mr. President, this piece of legislation is gonna change our country from when John Kennedy said “Ask not what your country can do for you, what you can do for your country,” that piece of legislation will change us to how much more can my country do for me?

And we are at 30 and a half trillion dollars of debt and climbing. And we have to be serious about this, but inflation is wreaking havoc on everybody’s lives. I don’t care what social rung you’re on. So that’s why that one killed — there’s no such thing as Build Back Better again. This is a financial security and energy security. This is what this is about.

BUCK: That’s Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, a lone, sane voice in the Senate when it comes to Democrats. I mean, Kyrsten Sinema is not quite as reliably not crazy as he is, but she’s also been willing to stand up and say, hey, you guys, this whole spending trillions more when we have terrible inflation is a really bad idea.

Clay, I’m sure you saw there’s all this polling now coming out constantly about how what is the reality for the American people right now? Not for multimillionaire CNN anchors and, you know, Nancy Pelosi, whose husband has a remarkable ability to trade the stock market and to buy things right before legislation is passed that will dramatically increase the value. And Nancy Pelosi was opposed to insider training prohibition for members of Congress based on political information. Hmm.

But look. There’s so much corruption with the Democrats, and we only have so much time in any given day. We’re probably gonna do a whole hour of Hunter Biden’s mess tomorrow. But, Clay, this is a moment where the American people are saying — they’re cutting back on going to restaurants, traveling, traveling to see family members, traveling for vacation — and this comes after we’d all been locked into our homes, right?

This comes after we had had our freedom taken away and now financial freedom for a lot of people just in their day-to-day not, you know, slapping the butler around with a thousand-dollar bill. But being able to take the family to a, you know, national park or Disney or whatever, people all across the country are skipping this because they can’t afford it ’cause they’re worried about gas, they’re worried about the price of food, the price of the meat they need, the price of paying the mortgage every month.

And what’s the Democrat answer for this? Let’s just spend more money.

CLAY: Yeah. My father-in-law was in town last weekend, and I’ve talked about this before; he’s from the Detroit area and he runs a meat packing plant. And he was showing me, he was signing all of the bills and paying everything. And he was showing me how much more everything costs in order to do his business versus what it did last year. And it’s all pretty extraordinary when you look at the prices of meat.

And that’s why the real dollars that everybody should be paying attention to is, what are your-take-home wages and what can you buy for those wages? Joe Biden in the last 18 months, if you have a job out there, most of you, including us, are taking home less than we were before Joe Biden took office.

And what I mean by that is real income, because given the fact that inflation’s at now 9.1%, unless in the last 18 months you have gotten a wage increase of more than 9%, you, even if you’ve made a little bit more money — let’s say you got a two or three or four percent wage increase — your effective income has gone down. And of course Joe Biden claimed I’m not gonna raise taxes on anyone making $400,000 or less. That was the big claim that he made.

Now, without Senator Manchin, the honest truth is he would have raised taxes on many people making under $400,000 a year. But inflation is a default tax, and that default tax strikes at people who spend a majority of the money that they make on day-to-day purchases. And so all of this has become, unfortunately, a drag on almost everyone.