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President Joe Biden on Friday continued to make the case for his $1.9 trillion relief plan, with his pitch coming after a monthly employment report showed the U.S. economy added a meager 49,000 jobs in January.
In a speech on his “American Rescue Plan,” Biden said he would prefer to have Republican support for his plan, but he would opt for having it pass the Democratic-run House and Senate quickly on party-line votes over negotiating with GOP lawmakers.
“If I have to choose between getting help right now to Americans who are hurting so badly and getting bogged down in a lengthy negotiation, or compromising on a bill that’s up to the crisis, that’s an easy choice. I’m going to help the American people who are hurting now,” the president said.
Biden indicated he wasn’t interested in reducing the amount that he has proposed for the next round of stimulus checks, after 10 Republican senators floated direct payments of $1,000, as part of their $618 billion aid plan.
“I’m not cutting the size of the checks. They’re going to be $1400 — period. That’s what the American people were promised,” he said.
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Biden also painted the GOP approach as asking unemployed Americans to wait until 2025 for improvements. He said: “Are we going to say to millions of Americans who are out of work — many of whom have been out of work for six months or longer, who have been scarred by this economic and public-health crisis — ‘Don’t worry. Hang on. Things are going to get better. We’re going to go smaller, so it’s just going to take us a lot longer — like until 2025.’ That’s the Republican answer right now.”
The employment report said the private sector created just 6,000 jobs last month, while the unemployment rate fell to 6.3% largely because people dropped out of the labor force after giving up on job searches.
“We saw the jobs report — only 6,000 private-sector jobs have been created,” Biden said, making remarks before his speech as he met with House Democrats at the White House. “At that rate, it’s going to take 10 years before we get to full unemployment. That’s not hyperbole. That’s a fact.”
Biden said a lesson for the present time from the stimulus package after the 2008-9 financial crisis is that, “We can’t do too much here. We can do too little.”
“Real, live people are hurting, and we can fix it,” he added.
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Joseph Brusuelas, chief economist at RSM US, indicated some support for the president’s view as he assessed the latest jobs report.
“The soft January US employment report strongly implies that the next round of fiscal aid/stimulus needs to avoid an error on the side of caution and go big. Outside of professional business and services hiring this report is undeniably weak,” Brusuelas said in a tweet.
Read more: U.S. labor market displays ‘faint heartbeat’ — economists react to January jobs report
But economist Larry Summers, who was a top adviser in the Obama administration, warned in a Washington Post column on Thursday that Biden’s plan could be too big and might “set off inflationary pressures of a kind we have not seen in a generation, with consequences for the value of the dollar DXY, -0.54% and financial stability.”
Democratic lawmakers are poised to use a process called budget reconciliation to push through Biden’s $1.9 trillion plan without any Republican support, with the Senate voting early Friday in favor of a resolution that will allow for fast tracking it.
See: Feb. 16 is the next big day for Biden’s economic plan
U.S. stocks DJIA, +0.25% were gaining on Friday, a day after the S&P 500 SPX, +0.39% and Nasdaq COMP, +0.47% closed at records.
