![\"\"](\"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/Janet-Yellen-300x200.jpg\")
VOA \u2014 WASHINGTON – U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said Sunday it \u201cwill take years\u201d to get the country\u2019s coronavirus-ravaged economy back on track if Congress fails to enact President Joe Biden\u2019s $1.9 trillion relief package, rejecting Republican claims that it is too big.\u00a0<\/p>\n![\"President](\"https:\/\/im-media.voltron.voanews.com\/Drupal\/01live-166\/styles\/221x146\/s3\/2021-02\/AP21036553395363.jpg?itok=r5aps7ci\")
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\nBoth chambers of Congress, each narrowly controlled by Biden\u2019s Democratic Party, voted last week for budget rules that, if necessary, would allow Democrats to push through the new spending on party-line votes in both the Senate and House of Representatives without any support from Republican lawmakers.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Biden told reporters Friday, \u201cI\u2019ve told both Republicans and Democrats, that\u2019s my preference, to work together.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cBut 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\u2019s up to the crisis, that\u2019s an easy choice,\u201d the president said. \u201cI\u2019m going to help the American people who are hurting now.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Based on the country\u2019s slow recovery from the Great Recession in 2008 and 2009, Biden said, \u201cOne thing we learned is, you know, we can\u2019t do too much here. We can do too little. We can do too little and sputter.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Top White House advisers are hoping to pass the Biden proposal by the first week of March, ahead of a March 15 deadline when current $300-a-week extra payments from the national government to jobless workers on top of less generous state benefits are set to expire. Biden wants to increase the extra federal payments to $400 a week through September.\u00a0<\/p>\n
A group of 10 Republican senators met with Biden at the White House last week, lobbying to keep the payments at $300 a week but ending them in June.\u00a0<\/p>\n Biden also plans to send $1,400 checks to millions of adult Americans, but Yellen said precise details of what income level the payments would be cut off have yet to be worked out.\u00a0<\/p>\n Republicans opposed to Biden\u2019s relief package are pointing to an opinion article published in The Washington Post last week by former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, a Democrat, suggesting that the size of Biden\u2019s relief deal could \u201cset off inflationary pressures of a kind we have not seen in a generation.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Republican Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, in a CNN interview, said the U.S. is not facing \u201can economy in collapse.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n He said it is too soon to enact another big coronavirus relief measure.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThe ink is hardly dry on the last bill,\u201d Toomey said, referring to a $900 billion package that then-President Donald Trump approved in late December.\u00a0<\/p>\n Toomey said that while Biden has \u201cmade great speeches on (political) unity, he\u2019s governing from the hard left.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" VOA \u2014 WASHINGTON – U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said Sunday it \u201cwill take years\u201d to get the country\u2019s coronavirus-ravaged economy back on track if Congress fails to enact President Joe Biden\u2019s $1.9 trillion relief package, rejecting Republican claims that it is too big.\u00a0 Yellen told CNN that with passage of the relief deal, the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":92642,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-92641","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-recposts"],"translation":{"provider":"WPGlobus","version":"3.0.2","language":"en","enabled_languages":["fa","en"],"languages":{"fa":{"title":true,"content":false,"excerpt":false},"en":{"title":true,"content":true,"excerpt":false}}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92641","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=92641"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92641\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":92644,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92641\/revisions\/92644"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/92642"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=92641"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=92641"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/PERSIAN-HERITAGE.COM\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=92641"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"U.S.](\"https:\/\/im-media.voltron.voanews.com\/Drupal\/01live-166\/styles\/sourced_737px_wide\/s3\/2021-02\/2021-02-01T222336Z_1927902747_RC2YJL944KAH_RTRMADP_3_USA-BIDEN.JPG?itok=9Vzdgiu8\")
<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>