The American Rescue plan which passed 219-212 in the US House of Representatives now heads to the Senate for a final vote. The Senate is expected to debate the bill this week.
The bill, which is designed to help Americans still struggling from the pandemic, also addresses issues veterans’ access to health care, getting kids back in school.
On Monday, Democrats backed away from including raising the minimum wage to $15.
“There are some investments you can't afford not to make and this is a good example of that,” US Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg said.
Among the proposals in the House version of the bill:
- Give working families a $1,400 per-person check, bringing their total relief payment from this and the December down payment to the $2,000 it should’ve been from the start, helping families who have been hardest hit financially by this crisis.
- Extend current unemployment insurance benefits and eligibility and provide a $400 supplement until the end of September.
- Increase the value of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits and invest $3 billion to help women, infants and children Increase the Child Tax Credit to $3,000 per child ($3,600 for a child under age 6) and make 17-year-olds qualifying children for the year.
- Raise the maximum Earned Income Tax Credit for childless adults from roughly $530 to close to $1,500, raise the income limit for the credit from about $16,000 to about $21,000, and eliminate the age cap for older workers.
- Provide nearly $13.5 billion to support VA health care operations and ensure COVID-19 related health care access for the 9.3 million veterans enrolled in the VA health care system.
- Provide $130 billion -- supplemented by additional state and local relief -- to help schools serve all students, no matter where they are learning, to open the majority of K-8 schools within the first 100 days of the Biden Administration.
"There is a very serious, very grave risk to our economy if we don't do enough, in a $20 trillion economy if we want to continue growing we got to make sure we act to stop the greatest threat to our prosperity and that's what the American rescue plan is about,” said Buttigieg.
Republicans in Congress say the plan is too expensive and includes things like transportation projects that have nothing to do with relief for COVID-19.
“How is someone supposed to get a vaccine if they rely on transit to get to a vaccination site but their transit agency is barely limping along because they lost so much revenue due to COVID?" said Buttigieg.
Not one Republican in the House voted for the bill.