Senate GOP assails Biden infrastructure plan as job killer that will give China, Russia a say in US tax laws
Biden and his team, meanwhile, have performed rhetorical gymnastics to make almost everything in the package sound infrastructure-ish.
Senate Republicans are warning that President Biden’s proposed $2.7 trillion infrastructure plan will undermine jobs and ultimately crush taxpayers – the very opposite of what the bill proposes to accomplish. In a memo first obtained by Fox News, senate members chastised the president’s infrastructure plan – or “job-crushing slush fund,” as they called it – for spending “just 5% of the $2.7 trillion on roads and bridges.”
FILE: President Joe Biden speaks about gun violence prevention in the Rose Garden at the White House in Washington. (AP)
They called the rest of the bill a “wish list of non-infrastructure spending” on failed Obama-era policy proposals and Democratic pet projects with no “accountability or transparency.” They said the rest of the bill contains “a dog’s breakfast of slush funds,” “expensive green energy mandates on Americans,” “a ban on the right to work,” and a “flurry of tax hikes that will drive companies out of the U.S.,” thus supposedly giving China and Russia a say in the United States’ tax laws.
The GOP Senate estimated that Biden’s infrastructure plan would, in the end, eliminate at least 1 million jobs in the U.S.
Biden and his team, meanwhile, have performed rhetorical gymnastics to make almost everything in the package sound infrastructure-ish
For example, strengthening the right of workers to join unions does not resemble concrete in an underpass. But a White House fact sheet argues that stronger union rights would “put in place an infrastructure to create good middle-class jobs,” an argument that could be used to justify domestic spending on lots of things. The Republican National Committee, on the other hand, has taken a strict view of what counts as infrastructure, contending that roads, bridges, waterways, ports, and airports count, but public transit, utilities and other foundational elements of the economy and daily lives don’t. The nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a deficit-hawk organization that does not like footloose government accounting or wasteful spending, described $621 billion in Biden’s plan, or roughly 30%, as “transportation infrastructure.”
