Although President Biden’s sweeping Build Back Better legislation is currently stalled in the U.S. Senate, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has just reaffirmed her support for the bill before members of the Senate Banking Committee.
The BBB legislation was introduced early last year by the President and came with an initial price tag of $3.5 trillion, a figure that was later lowered to around $2.2 trillion. The bill subsequently secured passage in the House of Representatives, but ultimately failed to gain traction in the upper chamber.
As proposed, the BBB would include some $555 billion for clean energy and climate change initiatives; $400 billion for childcare and preschool programs; $150 billion for housing; and another $150 billion for home care programs.
Critics of the bill have maintained that it is too big, too expensive, and too all-inclusive in terms of the number of programs and initiatives it would fund.
But Yellen in her testimony defended all the stimulus legislation proposed by the Biden Administration, including the BBB bill, which she described as “designed to mitigate what at the time seemed to be the most significant risks facing the economy.”
The Treasure Secretary added that despite charges that the BBB bill is a budget-buster, “if you look at the president’s budget, you will see that it is fully paid for through higher tax collections, and that the budget also incorporates substantial deficit reduction.”
West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, one of the most vocal opponents to the BBB legislation, said last month that he would be willing to back a reduced BBB bill focusing only on climate change, prescription drug prices, and deficit reduction.
Congressional analysts, however, say it is not certain that a slimmed down bill would prove successful because it could lose votes among the BBB’s original supporters.
By Garry Boulard
