Washington (US), May 4: U.S. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said on Monday that no Senate Republicans would support the 4.1-trillion-U.S.-dollar spending package proposed by President Joe Biden.
"I don't think there will be any Republican support -- none, zero -- for the 4.1 trillion dollar grab bag which has infrastructure in it but a whole lot of other stuff," McConnell said at a press conference in his home state Kentucky.
"We're open to doing a roughly 600 billion dollar package ...," he said.
McConnell's remarks came after a group of Senate Republicans last month unveiled a 568-billion-dollar infrastructure investment plan as they seek compromise with Democrats on the issue.
"This is the largest infrastructure investment Republicans have come forward with," Shelley Moore Capito, the top Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, said when unveiling the proposal.
Despite Republican objection, Biden has proposed a 2.3-trillion-dollar infrastructure plan and a 1.8-trillion-dollar spending proposal focusing on childcare and education, with higher taxes for corporations and wealthy households to pay for the massive package.
"For too long, we've had a two-tiered tax system. Working families pay taxes they owe on the wages they earn, while some of the wealthiest Americans avoid paying anything close to that fair share," Biden said Monday at an event.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Sunday also defended Biden's proposals on CNN, supporting "trading higher taxes on high-income taxpayers for middle-class tax cuts and major economic investments pro-growth."
But Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, urged Congress to shrink the size of the packages or identify additional offsets, arguing that Congress should match new spending and offsets over the customary 10-year timeframe, rather than the 15-year window Biden proposed.
Source: Xinhua
