(Bloomberg). — In his struggle to create a winning message about the battle to curb decades-high inflation, President Joe Biden has tried to tie Republicans to a plan calling for higher taxes for low-income Americans. 

There’s one problem: The GOP has disowned the proposal.

In recent days, Biden and his aides have repeatedly cited Republican Senator Rick Scott’s “Rescue America” plan — from February. That program included a call for “all Americans” to pay “some income tax to have skin in the game.” 

Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center projects that the proposal will raise taxes by $100 billion each year on those Americans with the lowest incomes.

“Congressional Republicans talk about inflation, but their only plan is to raise taxes on working families, taking even more money out of their pockets,” Biden said in a statement Wednesday responding to the latest inflation data, which showed a bigger jump in consumer prices than expected. 

Gene Sperling, a Biden senior adviser, said on Bloomberg Television’s “Balance of Power With David Westin” on Wednesday said that Scott, who authored the plan, is not “just an average senator,” because he is the chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee and speaks for his fellow party members.

Despite Democrats’ attempts to link the plan to Republicans, it has very little support in the party. Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell has said “it’s not the Republican plan.”

Scott himself tried to soften the language in April, saying that payroll taxes — the withholdings from paychecks that help fund Social Security and Medicare — should also count as paying taxes, though he hasn’t officially updated the plan.

“What the president is doing is he lies about things,” Scott said in an interview with Fox News when asked about Biden’s framing of the plan.

About 57% have no federal income tax liability due to tax benefits such as the earned tax credit or the child tax credit. These tax credits offset IRS bills. 

However, far fewer households — only about 17% — pay no federal taxes at all, because many pay payroll and excise taxes, even if they don’t owe anything on income.

“The Republican party is not going to vote for tax increases at the worst possible time,” Senator Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican, said on Bloomberg TV.

Instead, GOP legislators have focused their criticism on Biden and Democrats for the $1.9 Trillion pandemic relief bill passed in March 2021. They claim it helped to fuel price rises.

Still, Democrats are hoping to use the Republicans’ absence of any alternative policy platform to highlight the point that the opposing party has few published ideas about how to address inflation. 

“There isn’t an alternative plan they’ve put forward,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said at the White House briefing Tuesday. “So it’s either this, put together by the person who is leading the effort to win back the Senate, or nothing.”

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