The first thing that broke after Sen. Joe Manchin announced his opposition to President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better agenda, ostensibly because of his economic concerns, was news that Goldman Sachs was downgrading its economic forecast for the nation for the next quarter. “A failure to pass BBB has negative growth implications,” Goldman Sachs economists told clients Sunday. The economists wrote in a report that the failure to pass BBB has “negative implications for near-term consumption” and said that the uncertainty of the expanded child tax credit’s fate is the “most important question for the near-term outlook.” That’s the provision Manchin supposedly specifically opposes because he thinks “parents would waste monthly child tax credit payments on drugs instead of providing for their children,” to quote sources who are familiar with his comments to fellow Democrats. Robert Shapiro, economist and adviser to the Obama administration, toldThe Washington Post’s Greg Sargent that “Goldman Sachs is saying the impact on growth will be greater in not passing BBB than any marginal effect BBB might have on inflation.” He’s written about the fact that “President Biden and the Democratic Congress are set to preside over the strongest two-year performance on growth, jobs, and income in decades.” At least, that was his prediction pre-Manchin tantrum. Now? “Instead of having a Biden boom, we could have a Manchin slowdown,” Shapiro told Sargent. Read more