Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said President Joe Biden’s $4 trillion economic plan will likely not receive any support from the GOP.
During an appearance at the University of Louisville, McConnell said the spending includes a lot beyond infrastructure.
“I don’t think there will be any Republican support, none, zero, for the $4.1 trillion grab bag, which has infrastructure in it but a whole lot of other stuff,” he said.
Biden has outlined a two-part tax and spend proposal with funding for physical infrastructure projects as well as initiatives favored by his administration, such jobs training, elderly care and universal preschool. McConnell reiterated that the $4 trillion price tag was a nonstarter for Republicans, as well as some Democrats, who favor a smaller plan directly tied to infrastructure projects such as roads and bridges.
“There’s more money in there for electric cars than there are for roads, and bridges, and ports, and water lines … broadband, which we would all concede is infrastructure,” McConnell said.
“A whole lot of the rest of this money is for a whole lot of things that have nothing to do with infrastructure.” He added.
“So what we have offered is to support a more narrow proposal,” he said, referencing a proposal from Republican Sen. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia that would spend $568 billion on infrastructure, according to Fox News.
He said that plan “protects what all of us would agree is infrastructure and does not revisit the 2017 tax bill to pay for it.”
“The new administration wants to undo the most significant domestic accomplishment — other than judges — of the previous four years, and that is the 2017 tax bill,” he said. “How to pay for the infrastructure bill on our side — we’re not going to revisit the 2017 tax bill.”
“We’re open to doing a roughly $600 billion package which deals with what all of us would agree is infrastructure and to talk about how to pay for that in any way other than reopening the 2017 tax reform bill, which I believe — and all of my members believe — is what created, as of February 2020, the best economy in 50 years,” McConnell said.
“If it’s going to be about infrastructure, let’s make it about infrastructure. And I think there’s some sentiment on the Democratic side for splitting it off,” he said.
McConnell said big spending and big tax hikes will not get GOP support.
Read more on: The Western Journal
Watch it here: WHAS11/Youtube
Sources: The Western Journal, Fox News