Infrastructure is something desperately needed, but the $2.3 trillion American Jobs Plan set out by President Joe Biden contains only $160 billion in “real infrastructure” projects, Rep. Byron Donalds, R-Fla., tells Newsmax TV.
“This American Jobs Plan is a flat out joke,” Donalds said, Monday on Spicer & Co.” “This job’s bill that the president likes to talk about is not going to help our country, it’s gonna hurt it.”
Rather than creating “good jobs” as the White House claims, the bill actually would put Americans out of work, Donalds told hosts Steve Cortes and Lindsay Keith.
“It would destroy right-to-work laws in 27 states,” he said, as well as create massive tax increases on corporations, which would hurt small businesses because of the way they incorporate.
“After that, you go down the liberal wish list,” he added. “This is not gonna help jobs. It’s only gonna make matters worse here in the United States.”
Donalds also was critical of the bill’s focus on green energy, which he has called “China’s dream” and “America’s nightmare.”
“They want to focus on electric cars,” he said. “They want to build half a million electric charging stations around the United States when nobody even knows that there’s a half a million electric cars on the road in the United States to support it.”
The bill also supports tax credits to buy electric vehicles, but it won’t help poor Americans by electric vehicles because, Donalds said, the cost is too high and they don’t pay enough in federal income taxes to take advantage of the tax credit.
“This doesn’t get us focused on these green new deal policies which the Chinese frankly love because the Chinese understand what we seem to forget,” he said,” and that is if you don’t have a strong fossil fuel-based economy, you don’t have a strong economy, period.”
America should move toward more renewable power, Donalds said, “but we shouldn’t be forcing it by the strong arm of government. It’s something that the markets have to adopt over time. We’re already trending that way.”
Republicans would support a more narrow infrastructure bill focused on roads and bridges, the congressman said, echoing the words of Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, who declared plainly on Monday that Biden’s plan is “something we’re not going to do.”
Speaking to reporters in Kentucky, McConnell said Republicans could support a “much more modest” approach, and one that doesn’t rely on corporate tax hikes to pay for it.
A core dividing line is Biden’s effort to pay for infrastructure by undoing Donald Trump’s tax break for corporations, a signature achievement of the Trump White House and its partners in Congress.
The 2017 GOP tax bill, which all the Republicans voted for, slashed the corporate rate from 35% to 21%. It was supposed to usher in a new era of American investment and job creation, yet growth never came close to the promised levels and the economy fell into a recession because of the pandemic.
Biden proposes raising the rate to 28% and instituting a global minimum rate to dissuade companies from relocating to lower-tax havens.
The Associated Press contributed.
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Source: Newmax
