House GOP Leader: Biden Infrastructure Plan Will Bring Inflation ‘Tax’ to Lower-Earning Families

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) speaks during his weekly press briefing on Capitol Hill in Washington on March 18, 2021. Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said President Joe Biden’s infrastructure proposals would create significant inflation, which would thereby act as a “tax” for people who make less than $400,000.

Biden and his deputies have said they wouldn’t raise taxes on people making less than $400,000 per year. However, due to the sheer size of his two infrastructure proposals, worth about $4 trillion, some economists have warned that it would trigger significant inflation.

“When the president talks about not raising taxes on people under $400,000, that’s a lie. Every day you watch the inflation that he is creating. This is the Biden Tax,” McCarthy said on May 9 in an interview with John Catsimatidis on his radio show on WABC 770 AM.

McCarthy said that with these multi-trillion-dollar bills, “there’s just waste, fraud, abuse, but more importantly, corruption.”

To cite evidence of wasteful spending, he noted that about 6 percent of one of Biden’s infrastructure proposals would actually go to infrastructure.

He said that one provision would significantly invest in electric vehicles (EV), although there appears to be slow demand for them. According to the White House, Biden’s plan would include some $174 billion to “win the EV market” and “will enable automakers to spur domestic supply chains from raw materials to parts, retool factories to compete globally, and support American workers.”

“Less than three percent of America have an electric car, but they want the government to subsidize it,” McCarthy said. “And what they will do is raise the utility costs, a tax on all Americans.”

Biden has said that he will pay for the infrastructure plans by raising the corporate tax rate from 21 to 28 percent, which Republicans and some Democrats, such as Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), have rejected. He also proposed a tax on people making more than $400,000 per year.

Along with traditional infrastructure projects such as repairing or building roads and bridges, Biden’s packages would include funding to expand broadband internet, revamp water lines, and boost care for children and the elderly.

Republicans have proposed their own, scaled-down, $568 billion infrastructure plan, which leaves out climate change proposals and provisions to care for the disabled.

The White House has reportedly said that Biden will host Republicans, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and some senators, at the White House in the coming week.

“My hope is that if the president is unable to convince the narrow Democratic majority in the House and the 50–50 Senate to pass the $4.1 trillion bill, we can sit down and have a serious conversation,” McConnell said last week, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The Epoch Times has contacted the White House for comment.