WASHINGTON, June 5 — US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen yesterday said she never pushed for cuts to President Joe Biden’s US$1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, rebutting a...
WASHINGTON, June 5 — US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen yesterday said she never pushed for cuts to President Joe Biden’s US$1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, rebutting a media report in which a biographer was quoted as saying she favoured scaling it back to avoid inflation.
The White House issued a statement of its own, arguing that the American Rescue Plan helped engineer a strong US recovery and that higher food and energy prices were not the result of the stimulus package. Bloomberg on Friday quoted an advance copy of a biography on Yellen, written by journalist Owen Ullmann, who said that her concern about inflation was why Yellen pushed officials – without success – to reduce the size of the stimulus package by a third before Congress passed the program.Congress passed the American Rescue Plan a year ago and it was signed into law a year ago, marking a signature achievement of Biden’s first year in office.