House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn said Friday that certain provisions could be removed from President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats’ sweeping social spending package in order to pay for it.
“There’s nothing that I don’t think cannot be cut,” the South Carolina Democrat said during an MSNBC interview on Friday.
Clyburn said some of the “numbers we’ve been belaboring for months now” could be trimmed if it included some of their priorities as short-term provisions rather than stretching them out over 10 years.
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Asked to address the various proposed price tags on the package — from $6 trillion down to $3.5 trillion to less than $2 trillion — Clyburn said it was a matter of finding a “sweet spot.”
“I don’t think that anyone ever thought that after doing the rescue plan of over a trillion dollars, that we would come back with a $6 trillion program,” Clyburn said. “The question is: How do you pay for that? Because we’re committed, Democrats are committed to paying for what we do. We saw the Republicans do a nearly $2 trillion tax cut and pass it on to our children and grandchildren to pay for it sometime in the future. That’s not our philosophy. Our philosophy is, let’s do what we need to do, but let’s pay for it. And so, there’s no way to pay for a $6 trillion program.”
Clyburn added that he questions “whether or not $3.5 trillion could be paid for.”
“In fact, I said at the time that I thought that somewhere between $1.5 [trillion] and $3.5 [trillion], we’ll be able to find a sweet spot,” he said. “And that seems to be what’s taking place now. We are close to finding the sweet spot, and it will be between those two numbers.”
Clyburn’s remarks struck a contrast with Biden, who has described the effort as zero cost. In remarks Thursday at a CNN town hall, the president said the bill, which is still under negotiation, is “paid for, every single penny.” The Washington Post gave a similar claim from Biden two Pinocchios last month.
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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Friday that a deal was within reach on the spending package. However, congressional Democrats have not yet reached an agreement on the size and scope of the spending plan amid disagreements between their liberal and centrist members.
