Biden's tax hike proposal to face tough battle in Congress

Outside the Capitol Hill, intense discussions over the proposed tax hikes are underway.

Neil L. Bradley, executive vice president of the US Chamber of Commerce, praised the idea of funding infrastructure largely through user-based fees, rather than tax hikes, welcoming a bipartisan proposal recently released by the House Problem Solvers Caucus.

"While proposing ways to pay for new spending and for expanded refundable tax credits is laudable, the Biden administration has chosen to pursue inefficient tax increases that would undermine economic growth and reduce US competitiveness," said Erica York, an economist with the right-leaning Tax Foundation.

Amid doubts and concerns, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Sunday defended Biden's proposals on CNN, giving a "resounding yes" to the question of whether "trading higher taxes on high-income taxpayers for middle-class tax cuts and major economic investments pro-growth."

Despite pro-growth arguments, Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a US watchdog group, urged Congress to shrink the size of the packages or identify additional offsets, or some combination, arguing that Congress should match new spending and offsets over the customary 10-year timeframe, rather than the 15-year window Biden proposed.

"Usually people with big dreams are successful, but, I guess on the flip side of that, I have concerns of who's going to pay for all those big dreams," Tom Waters, a soybean and corn farmer in Orrick, in the Midwest state of Missouri, told Xinhua.