President Biden will promote his so-called American Family Plan during an address to Congress tonight, but the White House has now detailed the proposal ahead of Biden's speech.
As the name implies, we already knew the Family Plan would focus on families, but now we know that includes a very generous expansion of tax credits for families and low-income individuals that qualify for the earned income tax credit.
The $1.8 trillion spending proposal also includes universal pre-school and free community college among other things.
From Bloomberg:
Called the American Families Plan, Biden’s third major legislative proposal combines $1 trillion in spending with $800 billion in tax cuts and credits for middle- and lower-income families.
The plan would make pre-kindergarten and community college free across the country, extend the child tax credit through 2025 and make permanent an expansion of the earned income tax credit to childless adults with low incomes, provide direct support to families for child care, finance teacher training and create a national paid family leave program. [...]
Making the earned income tax credit expansion permanent would help an estimated 17 million low-income workers, while extending the child tax credit would benefit an estimated 66 million kids, the White House said.
This all sounds good to me, of course, but the real question is whether or not it sounds good to the likes of Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema.
At the end of the day, passing virtually anything that's even remotely ambitious will require using the budget reconciliation process to bypass a Republican filibuster and it remains to be seen if Manchin, for example, will have the stomach for this passing this plan after eventually passing the American Jobs Plan this summer.
While Biden's American Jobs Plan is primarily funded by raising taxes on corporations, the American Family Plan is funded by raising taxes on wealthy shareholders who pay lower taxes on their investments than average working people do on their wages. I think that's fair, but what Manchin thinks he can sell to his constituents may be another story.
Biden will address Congress at 9 p.m. eastern time tonight.