Manchin: "We cannot live with this crippling debt"

Sen. Joe Manchin’s eleventh-hour midterm pitch was imploring Congress to deal with the nation’s ‘crippling debt’ by reforming Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare and other programs he claims are ‘going bankrupt.’

The West Virginia Democrat told a Fortune CEO conference on Thursday he would like the next Congress to work on bipartisan entitlement reform to fix the programs that are facing ‘tremendous problems.’

‘We cannot live with this crippling debt,’ Manchin griped, per Bloomberg. ‘If we can’t come to grips of how we face the financial challenges this country has, then we’re all going to be paying a price that we can’t afford.’