Biden’s New Relief Package Gives Billions To Liberal Agenda

The new coronavirus relief package proposed by President-elect Joe Biden comes with a high price tag for taxpayers at a total of $1.9 trillion, and his economic advisor, Brian Deese, fought to include several Democratic agenda items.

Deese said during an interview with “Fox News Sunday” that $1,400 stimulus payments to all Americans, $20 billion for public transit, $9 billion toward cybersecurity, and raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour were all necessary to help Americans suffering during the pandemic.

“Let’s look at each of those. The cybersecurity resources there are in the wake of the SolarWinds hack. We have seen, and now understand significant vulnerabilities that are exacerbated by COVID, and the fact so much federal operations are happening online,” said Deese. “We need those resources to secure our systems now.”

Deese did not say how transit funding was connected to the COVID-19 relief, just a short explanation saying, “…our transit systems across the country are facing acute crisis…” and improving them while people are still working remotely will prevent difficulties when people eventually begin commuting again.

As for raising the minimum wage, he said it “is a concrete and direct way to help support those workers who are out there on the front lines right now, providing services to all of us, and give them direct support and a direct boost right now.”

Republicans were unwilling to spend more than $1 trillion in the last package and that was with a Republican president. Now with Biden saying “there’s not time to waste” and “we have to act now,” host of “Fox News Sunday” Chris Wallace asked if the President-elect would support ending the filibuster if the GOP rejected his plan that nearly doubles their spending limit. Deese would not give a straight answer but pointed to Biden’s previous calls for unity.

“Well look, we think we need to move quickly here, but I would also say there’s a lot of skepticism that the president-elect’s call for unity and working together was going to resonate and he won the election resoundingly. There’s a lot of skepticism that Congress would come together in a bipartisan way and deliver a down payment on this relief, and that happened. So let’s see where we can get here,” said Deese. “There is a lot of, again, a lot of elements of this plan that have support across the board, both in Washington and in state capitals and around the country.”

“But we need to act,” he added. “We need to act quickly. That’s what the economy is telling us, that’s what the experts are telling us and so that’s our priority.”