Biden proposes a two-sided infrastructure package !
The proposal includes traditional types of infrastructure and essential services. White House press secretary Jen Psaki said on Monday Mr Biden’s speech in Pennsylvania would focus on roads, railways and domestic production. Psaki added that Mr Biden would return to the second phase – which includes health care, child care and education – in April.
“The president has a plan to renovate our country’s infrastructure,” Psaki said. “We are currently 13 in the world. No one believes we should be there, and he has a plan to pay you, which he will suggest.”
Psaki told reporters that executives were open to listening to members of Congress as they offered their suggestions on how to pay for the program, which reportedly reached $ 3 trillion. He pointed out that modifying the tax code could increase the cost of paying for the program.
“He believes that investing in our infrastructure, and continuing to create jobs for unions is a priority,” said Phaki. “But he also believes we have a chance to balance it out, to look at our tax code that is no longer valid. And some may pay more in our country which is not yet available.”
Obtaining support from Republicans in Congress will be difficult, especially after Democrats, in passing a $ 1.9 trillion COVID incentive package, used the budget reconciliation process to limit the 60-vote limit required by most of the Senate laws and instead passed a simple ballot-vote bill. Asked if it was possible for the White House to try to split the economic recovery process into two parts in order to gain Republican infrastructure support, Senate Minority Whip John Thune told reporters last week that the Senate Republicans would not support the “strategy.”
“If they want to sit down with the Republicans, which is something they have to do, the Republicans will work with them to pass infrastructure,” Thune said on Tuesday. He added, “But if they decide to do that as a ploy to persuade Republicans to vote for simple things and do all those things, arguments for reconciliation, I don’t think our boys will take the trap of that.”
It is not only Republicans that Mr Biden should win. Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia says he wants to see Republican views, so that the Senate does not need to reconcile in order to pass. Senate Majority leader Chuck Schumer said last week he believed Americans knew the infrastructure needed to be “green” and hoped Republicans would work in the package. But Schumer added that if the parties could not work together, Democrats would “move forward.” Independent Senator Bernie Sanders, chairman of the Senate Budget committee, said he was determined to use reconciliation to move the infrastructure package through the Senate.
The use of reconciliation is being scrutinized by a member of the Senate, with Schumer’s policymakers arguing that a section of the Congress Congress Budget Act of 1974 allows Democrats to use reconciliation again this financial year, but Schumer’s aide said the legal strategy had not yet been finalized.
Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell said at a press conference on Monday that he did not want to see a tax increase “across America.”
“My advice to management is that if you want to do an infrastructure bill, let’s make an infrastructure bill,” McConnell said. “Let’s not respond to big efforts to raise taxes for businesses and individuals.”
Transport Secretary Pete Buttigieg summoned members of the House last week about a major investment in infrastructure, telling them that this is “the best opportunity in our lifetime to invest in infrastructure.” The House of Republicans, however, still favors a small bill.
“I think the transport bill needs to be a transport bill, not a Green New Deal,” Congress of Republican Sam Samves, a senior member of the House of Transport and Infrastructure committee, told Buttigieg last week. “It has to talk about roads and bridges.”