Democrats and Republicans are battling to win the messaging war over President Joe Biden’s social welfare spending package that would create many government programs and subsidies that GOP lawmakers have labeled as a new form of welfare.
The fight comes as Democrats are struggling to arrive at an agreement with the centrists in their own party on the size and cost of the package, as well as how to pay for it.
Republicans, who are sidelined in the minority, are taking potshots at the spending proposal.
Sen. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, criticized Democrats’ efforts to extend the temporary expanded federal child tax credit that pays families around $300 monthly per child and could be awarded to those living in the United States illegally.
“Their next reckless taxing and spending spree proposes to double down on Democrats’ new monthly welfare deposits that can flow directly to people who are here illegally,” McConnell said Tuesday.
Democrats expanded the child tax credit in the last round of federal COVID-19 aid, making it available to those with little or no income. Democrats want to extend the program in the social welfare spending bill for more years and continue to allow families that are here illegally to receive the checks.
Democrats are also seeking to grow Obamacare subsidies and extend the earned income tax credit, provide free preschool, and expand broader Medicaid benefits to all 50 states.
Democratic leaders promote the package as transformational and necessary to help meet the extraordinary needs of the public, comparing the nation’s pandemic struggles to the Great Depression and other points in history.
“We had the New Deal era, we had the Great Society, civil rights era. We are on the verge of delivering a Build Back Better era,” House Democratic Caucus Chairman Hakeem Jeffries, a New York Democrat, said Tuesday after a closed-door meeting with party lawmakers. “And we’re closer than we’ve ever been.”
Republicans Tuesday called the package “a reckless tax and spending bill” that will fuel skyrocketing inflation and rising energy prices.
Those concerns are shared by Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, two centrist Democrats who are driving down the cost and size of the bill.
Manchin has repeatedly cited concerns over inflation among the reasons he wants to lower the cost of the package.
Democrats initially hoped to spend up to $3.5 trillion on new social welfare programs that would have included free community college and 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave.
But Manchin and Sinema refused to support the plan, citing cost, primarily, as well as opposition to other policy changes affecting Medicare drug prices and green energy proposals.
“Ignoring the fiscal consequences of our policy choices will create a disastrous future for the next generation of Americans,” Manchin wrote in the Wall Street Journal in September.
The measure is now likely to cost well under $2 trillion and will likely have to shed the free college and much, if not all, of paid family and medical leave.
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The Biden administration has touted the benefits as “historic middle-class tax cuts” and said the tax credits will provide 39 million households and the parents of 90% of children “a major tax cut” that will halve the child poverty rate.
Republicans hope to use the “welfare” line of attack to make it harder for Democrats to reach an accord.
Earlier this month, GOP members of the House Ways and Means Committee held a public forum to highlight “the massive welfare state expansion included in Democrats’ Build Back Better reconciliation bill and how policies that foster government dependency ultimately fail our most vulnerable families and children.”
