President Joe Biden has a new name for his massively expensive $1.2 trillion “infrastructure” spending plan.
The White House unveiled a new website on Wednesday, dubbing the cash-flushing plan “Build a Better America” – which, after Biden “forged consensus and compromise between Democrats, Republicans, and Independents to demonstrate our democracy can deliver big wins for the American people,” represents “a historic investment in America that will change people’s lives for the better and get America moving again,” the website says.
And showing he still has the plagiarist’s touch, Biden’s statement on the webpage ended with, “Let’s get to work.” That happened to be the campaign slogan for now-U.S. Sen. Rick Scott when the Florida Republican ran for governor in 2010.
But as the White House touts Building a Better America, the old Build Back Better bill, or BBB, another $1.7 trillion boondoggle that has nothing to do with infrastructure but everything to do with implementing a socialist worldview for America, remains mired amid partisan squabbling.
Republicans on Wednesday noted that, contrary to everything Democrats claim to stand for, Democratic hypocrisy is rampant in the BBB proposal.
GOP senators pointed out that the second most expensive item in the bill is actually a huge tax break for residents of high-tax blue states.
The measure refers to SALT, which stands for state and local taxes.
Taxpayers once could write off such taxes on the federal income taxes. President Donald Trump stopped that, capping how much taxpayers in states that impose state income taxes, for instance, could claim for deductions.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi last month inserted that significant tax cut back into the BBB bill now under consideration in the Senate.
Under the Trump law, taxpayers claiming SALT were capped at $10,000. The current Democratic plan boosts that to $80,000.
At a press conference attended by Scott and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, among other Republicans, Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming noted that the average taxpayer claiming SALT would save $15,000.
Sen. John Thune of South Dakota said the SALT provision “benefits principally millionaires and billionaires in big, high tax states at the expense of low-tax states.”
States that don’t have an income tax, such as Florida, “end up subsidizing taxpayers in high-tax states like New York and New Jersey, and California, by the way, which are the three biggest beneficiaries of this particular provision in the Democrats’ reckless tax and spending spree bill,” Thune said.
He added that Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa has referred to the BBB as the “blue-state billionaire bailout.”
This measure is “designed specifically to give huge tax cuts to millionaires and billionaires in high-tax states,” said Thune. “I would certainly hope that Democrats would come to the conclusion that whether or not they want to spend more and grow government and expand government, which they’re doing in all kinds of crazy ways with this bill, that they ought not be allowing millionaires and billionaires to receive a huge tax cut.”
In his comments, Barrasso noted it’s “cash for Christmas for their largest donors.”
“So, who benefits? Well, the people who own the penthouse apartments in New York City that overlook Central Park, who hold the big fundraisers for the Democrats; the people who own the mansions in California, in San Francisco, and in Hollywood who are all the big fundraisers for the Democrats,” he added.
“Cash for them, salt in the wounds of everyone else.”
Barrasso added, “There’s more money in this for the very rich than there is to help try to alleviate poverty in this bill. This is obscene, and it makes a mockery of everything that Pelosi and [Senate Majority Leader Chuck] Schumer and President Biden claim that they stand for. That’s why we need to defeat the entire bill.”
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