Biden dubbed the Six Trillion Dollar Man
President also described as ‘15-year-old with a credit card’ as Republicans lash out over spending spree
REPUBLICANS last night branded Joe Biden the “Six Trillion Dollar Man” as they vowed to bitterly oppose his plans for the biggest expansion of the US government’s role in over half a century.
In his first speech to Congress, the president outlined massive spending programmes, adding up to $6trillion (£4trillion), which would be paid for by a host of tax raids on the wealthy.
That would include doubling capital gains tax on people making over $1million to 43.4 per cent, raising corporation tax from 21 per cent to 28 per cent, and the top rate of income tax from 37 per cent to 39.6 per cent.
Mr Biden said he wanted to make a “once-in-a-generation investment” and undertake the “largest jobs plan since World War Two”, calling it a “blue-collar blueprint to rebuild America”.
He pointedly rejected the “small government” philosophy espoused by Ronald Reagan and said he would focus on recouping more money from millionaires, billionaires and corporations. He said: “My fellow Americans, trickledown economics has never worked. It’s time to grow the economy from the bottom and middle out. There are good guys and women on Wall Street. But Wall Street didn’t build this country. The middle-class built this country. And unions built the middle-class.”
He will face a battle to get his proposals through Congress amid unified Republican opposition, and even some Democratic concern over their scale.
Joe Manchin, a Democratic senator from West Virginia, said: “It’s a lot of money, a lot of money. That makes you very uncomfortable.” Delivering the Republican response to the speech, Tim Scott, the only black Republican senator, accused Mr Biden of setting out “socialist dreams” and “pulling us further and further apart”.
Karl Rove, the influential Republican strategist, called Mr Biden the “Six Trillion Dollar Man”, a reference to 1970s TV series The Six Million Dollar Man.
He said the “unsustainable” spending would make Democrats “vulnerable” in midterm congressional elections in November 2022.
And Chris Christie, the former Republican presidential candidate, compared Mr Biden to a “15-year-old with a credit card”. Mr Biden argued that his $2.3trillion plan to rebuild infrastructure would create millions of jobs. He said: “I can report to the nation America is on the move again. After 100 days of rescue and renewal America’s ready for a take-off. There is no quit in America.
“We have stared into an abyss of insurrection and autocracy, of pandemic and pain, and ‘We the People’ did not flinch.”
The president then cast his $1.8trillion American Families Plan, which would provide childcare, paid parental leave and community college education, as a long-term measure to outcompete China. He said: “We need to prove that democracy still works. The autocrats of the world are betting it can’t. They believe we are too full of anger and division and rage, that the sun is setting on American democracy. They are wrong.”
With the Senate split 50-50 and Kamala Harris, the vice-president, holding a casting vote, Mr Biden can afford no defections by moderate Democrats.
Separately, Donald Trump said that he was “100 per cent” considering a 2024 run. He told Fox Business: “Polls show everybody wants me to do it.” The former president said he would “certainly” consider Ron Desantis, the Florida governor, as a running mate.