Bill Gates was instrumental in convincing Seantor Joe Manchin to cast his vote in favor of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, according to a new report by Bloomberg.
Manchin said “no” to the Inflation Reduction Act for a second time in December, citing concerns that it would make rising debt and inflation much worse. That’s when Gates stepped in, meeting with Manchin and his wife at a Washington, D.C., restaurant.
Thenewamerican.com reports: Reportedly, the senator was determined to preserve coal jobs in his state — which the Biden-signed bill places in jeopardy with its climate provisions. Gates told Manchin that West Virginia coal workers would be able to jump over to nuclear plants instead.
The talks initially proved fruitless, with Manchin declaring on February 1 that the legislation was “dead.”
At this, Democrats pulled out all the stops to convince their hesitant colleague. One of the big names they deployed was former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, who assured Manchin that the bill wouldn’t make taxes on the middle class go up or increase the deficit.
Collin O’Mara, chief executive officer of the National Wildlife Federation, told Bloomberg that Democrat-recruited economists were able to “send this signal [to Manchin] that [the bill’s] going to help with the deficit.”
“It’s going to be slightly deflationary and it’s going to spur growth and investment in all these areas,” O’Mara added.
Gates then went back in, meeting up with Manchin at the Sun Valley media conference in Idaho.
“We had a talk about what was missing, what needed to be done,” said Gates. “And then after that it was a lot of phone calls.”
The article explains that Gates had been working on Manchin since 2019:
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