The President’s massive infrastructure plan faces stiff resistance in the months ahead.
Republicans calling it a big-liberal spending agenda that comes with major tax hikes, while on the left, progressive Democrats are demanding even more money to tackle things like climate change.
President Biden says he’s open to negotiating the details of the $2 trillion-dollar-plus package, however, he said inaction isn’t an option.
“Here’s what we won’t be open to: we will not be open to doing nothing,” the President said Wednesday during the unveiling of his American Jobs Plan. “Inaction simply is not an option.”
While the plan calls for spending around $820 billion on roads, bridges, railways, airports, and power grids, there’s also massive amounts of money going to projects that Republicans say aren’t related to infrastructure, like $400 billion for care for the elderly and disabled.
“This package that they’ve laid out at the beginning styled infrastructure is a trojan horse for massive tax increases and a whole lot of more debt and a whole lot of spending,” warned Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.
Republicans say that extra spending coming from Democrats stretching the definition of “infrastructure”.
New York’s Democratic Senator Kirsten Gillibrand getting flak after she tweeted that “Paid leave is infrastructure. Child Care is infrastructure. Caregiving is infrastructure.”
Republicans like Ted Cruz pushing back:
“Abortion is infrastructure. Gun control is infrastructure. Forced unionization is infrastructure. Whatever the Left wants is infrastructure,” Cruz tweeted.
Politico estimated that only about 37 percent of the bill will be spent on what the President himself defines as infrastructure projects.
The President defending the amount of spending in the bill.
“I’ve heard from my Republican friends say that it’s — many of them say, it’s too big,” the President said. “They say, why not focus on traditional infrastructure? We are America. We don’t just fix for today. We build for tomorrow.”
The President wants to fund his agenda by raising the corporate tax rate to 28 percent, rolling back former President Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, and expanding the global minimum tax rate to 21 percent.
Republican lawmakers and business groups argue the hikes will crush American competitiveness.
“What the President proposed this week is not an infrastructure bill, it’s a huge tax increase, for one thing, and it’s a tax increase on small businesses, on job creators in the United States of America,” Sen. Roger Wicker said on NBC’s Meet The Press.
Democrats hoping to use a budget reconciliation process to bypass Republican opposition got a major setback from one of their very own today.
West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, a key Democrat vote, said under no circumstance would he support passing bills like the infrastructure one, without Republican support.
“I simply do not believe budget reconciliation should replace regular order in the Senate,” Manchin wrote in the Washington Post. “Senate Democrats must avoid the temptation to abandon our Republican colleagues on important national issues.
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