Read Joe Biden's Full Economic Address

President Joe Biden delivered a speech on his economic agenda on Thursday and unveiled a new framework for his sweeping "Build Back Better" proposal, a $1.75 trillion social safety net plan that will include money for child care and climate change.

"For much too long, working people of this nation and the middle class of this country have been dealt out of the American deal," Biden said from the White House. "It's time to deal them back in."

His announcement come after weeks of negotiations among congressional Democrats.

Progressives were forced to abandon some of their plans late Wednesday as the caucus scrambled to get Senator Joe Manchin on board with the infrastructure deal.

The newest price tag is significantly scaled down from the originally proposed $3.5 trillion plan.

The framework will also no longer have a provision for paid leave, much to the disappointment of the party's progressive members. Biden's initial plan included 12 weeks of paid leave, which was then reduced to 4 weeks before it was scrapped altogether.

"No one got everything they wanted, including me," Biden said on Thursday. "But that's what compromise is, that's consensus and that's what I ran on. I've long said compromise and consensus are the only way to get big things done in a democracy."

To pay for the package, Biden has proposed a 15 percent minimum tax on large corporations with more than a billion in profits and a new "surtax" on the highest-income Americans making multimillions and billions of dollars.

Democrats are planning to pass Biden's spending package through reconciliation, but the process will require all 50 senators of its caucus to back the bill before Biden can sign it into law.

White House officials have voiced confidence that the framework will earn the support necessary.

Read Biden's full address below:

Good morning.

Today, I am pleased to announce that after months of tough and thoughtful negotiations, I think we have a historic—I know we have a historic, economic framework that will create millions of jobs, grow the economy, invest in our nation and our people, turn the climate crisis into an opportunity to put us on a path not only to compete, but to win the economic competition for the 21st century against China and every other major country in the world. It's fiscally responsible. It's fully paid for. Seventeen Nobel Prize winners in economics have said it will lower the inflationary pressures on the economy. Over the next 10 years, it will not add to the deficit at all. It will actually reduce the deficit, according to the economists.

I want to thank my colleagues in Congress for the leadership. We spent hours and hours and hours over months and months working on this. No one got everything they wanted, including me, but that's what compromise is, that's consensus and that's what I ran on. I've long said compromise and consensus are the only way to get big things done in a democracy. Important things done for the country. I know it's hard. I know how deeply people feel about the things that they fight for. But this framework includes historic investments in our nation and in our people.

Any single element of this framework would fundamentally be viewed as a fundamental change in America. Taken together, they're truly consequential. I'll have more to say after I return from the critical meetings in Europe this week, but for now, let me lay out a few points.

First, we face—and I apologize for saying this again—we face an inflection point as a nation. For most of the 20th century we lead the world by a significant margin because we invested in our people. Not only in our roads and our highways and our bridges, but in our people, in our families. We didn't just build an interstate highway system, we built a highway to the sky. We invested to win the space race and we won. We're also among the first to provide access to free education for all Americans beginning back in the late 1800s. That decision alone to invest in our children and their families was a major part of why we were able to lead the world for much of the 20th century. But somewhere along the way, we stopped investing in ourself, investing in our people. America is still the largest economy in the world. We still own the most productive workers and most innovative minds in the world. But we've risked losing our edge as a nation.

Our infrastructure used to be rated the best in the world. Today, according to the World Economic Forum, we ranked 13th in the world, we used to lead the world in educational achievement. Now, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development ranks America 35th out of the 37 major countries when it comes to investing in early childhood education and care. We know how our children start impacts significantly on how they'll finish. We can't be competitive in the 21st century global economy if we continue this slide.

That's why I've said all along. We need to build America from the bottom up and the middle out. Not from the top down with the trickle-down economics that's always failed us. I can't think of a single time when the middle class has done well but the wealthy haven't done very well. There have been many times, including now, when the wealthy, the super wealthy do very well and the middle class doesn't do well. That's why I proposed the investments Congress is now considering, in two critical pieces of legislation, positions I ran on as president, positions I announced when I laid out in a joint session of Congress what my economic agenda was.

These are not about left versus right or moderate versus progressive or anything else that pits Americans against one another. This is about competitiveness versus complacency. Competitiveness versus complacency. It's about expanding opportunity, not opportunity to deny. It's about leading the world or letting the world pass us by.

Today, with my Democratic colleagues, we have a framework for my Build Back Better initiative and here's how it will fundamentally change the lives of millions of people for the better.

Millions of you are in the so-called sandwich generation. You feel financially squeezed by raising a child and caring for an aging parent. About 820,000 seniors in America and people with disabilities have applied for Medicaid and they're on a waiting list right now to get home care. They need some help. They don't have to be kicked out of their homes, but they need little help getting around, having their meals made occasionally for them. They don't want to put them in nursing homes, not because of the costs, but because it's a matter of dignity. They want to stay in their homes, but it's hard. You're just looking for an answer. So your parents can keep living independently with dignity. For millions of families in America, this issue is the most important issue they're facing. It's personal.

So here's what we're going to do. We're going to expand services for seniors, so families can get help from well-trained, well-paid professionals to help them take care of their parents at home, to cook meals for them, to get their groceries for them, to help them get around, to help them live in their own home with the dignity they deserve to be afforded. Quite frankly, what we found is that this is more popular or as popular as anything else we're proposing because the American people understand the need. It's a matter of dignity and pride for our parents.

Thirty years ago we ranked number seventh among the advanced economies in the world as a share of women working. You know where we are today? We rank 23rd. Seven to twenty-three. Once again, our competitors are investing we're standing still. Today, there are nearly 2 million women in America not working today simply because they can't afford childcare.

A typical family spends about $11,000 a year on childcare, some states it is $14,500 a year per child. We're going to make sure that all families earning less than $300,000 a year will pay no more than seven percent of their income for childcare. And for a family making $100,000 a year, that will save them more than $5,000 in childcare. This is a fundamental game changer for families and for our economy. As more parents, especially women, can get back to work and work in the workforce.

I look at a lot of significant press people in front of me. A lot of them are working—working mothers. I know what it cost. I remember when I got to the Senate, I lost my wife and daughter in an accident. My two boys. I started commuting 250 miles a day because I had my mom and my dad and my brother and my sister help me take care of my kids because I couldn't afford childcare and I was getting a serious salary—$42,000 a year.

We've also extended the historic middle class tax cut, that's what I call it, a middle tax tax cut for parents. That is the expanded child tax credit we passed through the American Rescue Plan. What that means is, for folks at home, they're getting $300 a month for every child under the age of six, $250 for every child under the age of 18. We're extending that. The money is already life-changing for so many working families. This will help cut child poverty in half this year, according to experts. That's not all it does. It changes the whole dynamic for working parents. In the past, if you paid taxes and had a good income, you could deduct under the tax code $2,000 per child from the taxes you owe. But how many families do you know—a cashier, a waiter, healthcare workers who never got the benefit of the full tax credit because they didn't have that much to deduct? And it wasn't refundable. So it either came off your tax bill or you didn't get full credit. Why should if somebody's making $500,000 a year or $150,000 or $200,000 a year get to write it off their taxes? And the people who need to help even more, they don't have that much tax to pay. They don't get the benefit and they have the same cost of raising their children. Eighty percent of those left out were working parents who just didn't make enough money. That's why in the American Rescue Plan we didn't just expand the amount of the middle class tax cut, we also made it refundable.

This framework will make it permanently refundable. Making sure the families who needed to get a full credit for it, in addition to those who already get in full credit.

We're going to make sure that every 3 and 4-year-old child in America will go to high quality preschool. That's part of the legislation I just brought up to the Congress. Studies show that when we put 3 and 4-year-olds in school—school, not daycare—we increase by up to 47 percent the chance that that child no matter what their background, will be able to earn a college degree. If my wife Jill was back here, she always says any country that out-educates us is going to outcompete us. We can finally take us from 12 years to 14 years of universal education in America.

We also make investments in higher education by increasing Pell Grants to help students from lower income families attend community college and four-year schools. And we invest in historically black universities, colleges, HBCUs, minority-serving institutions and tribal colleges to make sure every young student has a shot at a good paying job in the future.

This framework extends tax credits to lower premiums for folks who are on the Affordable Care Act for another three years. For 4 million folks in the 12 states that haven't expanded Medicaid, all the rest have, this framework will enable you to get affordable coverage and Medicare will now cover the cost of hearing aids and hearing checkups.

This framework also makes the most significant investment to deal with the climate crisis that has ever, ever happened. Beyond any other advanced nation in the world, over a billion metric tons of emission reductions, at least 10 times bigger on climate than any bill that has ever passed before and enough to position us for a 50 to 52 percent emission reductions by the year 2030. And we'll do it a ways to grow the domestic industries, create good paying union jobs, address long standing environmental injustice as well. Tax credits to help people do things like weatherize their homes so they use less energy, install solar panels and develop clean energy products. Help businesses produce more clean energy. And when paired with the bipartisan infrastructure bill, it will truly transform this nation. Historic investments in passenger rail. I know everybody says 'Oh Biden's a rail guy.' That's true. The passenger rail and freight rail and public transit—It's going to take hundreds of thousands of vehicles off the road, saving millions of barrels of oil. Everybody knows, all the studies show, if you can get from point A to point B on electric rail, you won't drive your car but take the rail service. But also learned that in most major cities in America, minority populations, the jobs that used to have in town, they're now out of town. Roughly 60 percent of the folks they don't have vehicles, so they need to have a means to get out of town, to their jobs, to be on time.

That's what this will do like it did for Detroit. Ninety-five percent of the 840,000 school buses in America run on diesel. Every day, more than 25 million children and thousands of bus drivers breathe polluted air on the way to and from school from the diesel exhaust. We're going to replace thousands of these with electric school buses that have big batteries underneath and are good for the climate. I went down to one of the manufacturing facilities, saw them, got in one, drove them. They do not expend any pollution into the air. We'll build out the first ever national network of 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations all across the country. So when you're buying an electric vehicle—you get credit for buying it—you buy an electric vehicle, you can go all the way across America on a single tank of gas, figuratively speaking. It's not gas, you plug it in. Five hundred thousands of them, these stations along the way. We're gonna get off the sidelines on manufacturing solar panels and wind farms and electric vehicles with targeted manufacturing credits. You manufacture, you get a credit for doing it.

These will help grow the supply chains and communities too often left behind and we will reward companies for paying good wages and for sourcing the materials from here in the United States. That means tens of millions of panels and turbines, doubling the number of electric vehicles we have on the road within just three years. We'll be able to sell and export these products and technologies to the rest of the world and creating thousands of more jobs because we are once again going to be the innovators.

We'll also make historic investments in environmental cleanup and remediation. That means putting people to work in good paying jobs at prevailing wage. Capping hundreds of thousands of abandoned wells and gas wells, oil and gas wells that need to be capped because they are leaky things that hurt the air. Putting a stop to the methane leaks in the pipelines. Protecting the health of our communities. It's a big deal. We'll build up our resilience for the next superstorm, drought, wildfires and hurricanes that represent a blinking code red for America and the world.

Last year alone, these types of extreme weather events you've all been covering and you've all witnessed and some of you have been caught in the middle of have caused $99 billion in damage to the United States for the last year. $99 billion. We're not spending any money to deal with this? It's costing us. Significantly. In Pittsburgh, I met an IBW electrical worker who climbs up on those power lines in the middle of a storm and tries to put transformers in to keep the lights on when the storm's here. He calls himself a 100 percent union guy. His job's dangerous. As he said, I quote, 'I don't want my kids growing up in a world where the threat of climate change hangs over their heads.' Folks, we all had that obligation and obligation to our children and our grandchildren.

The bipartisan infrastructure bill is also the most significant investment since we built the Interstate Highway System and won the space race decades ago. This starts rebuilding the arteries of our economy. Across the country now there are 45,000 bridges and 173 000 miles of roads that are in poor condition. Some of the bridges you don't even take a chance of going across, they've shut down. They can't be built back to the same standard because the weather is not going to get a lot better. We've just got to keep them from getting a heck of a lot worse.

We have to build back better and stronger. No one should have to hold their breath as across a rundown bridge or a dangerous intersection in their hometown. We're going to put hardworking Americans on the job to bring our infrastructure up to speed, good union jobs and prevailing wage. Jobs where you can raise a family. My dad would say you have a little breathing room. Jobs that can't be outsourced. Jobs replacing lead water pipes so families can drink clean water, improving the health of our children and putting plumbers and pipe-fitters to work. Jobs laying thousands of miles of transmission lines to build a modern energy grid. Jobs making a high speed internet affordable and available everywhere, in rural and urban America. Particularly including a 35 percent of rural America that goes without it right now.

This pandemic is made clear the need for affordable and available high speed internet. The idea of a parent having to put their kids in the car for virtual learning, drive and sit in a McDonald's parking lot, so the child can access the internet when school is taught virtually is not only unnecessary, it's just wrong. It's wrong. As I've said before, these plans are fiscally responsible. They are fully paid for. They don't add a single penny to the deficit. They don't raise taxes on anyone making less than $400,000 a year in fact, they reduce the deficit. Here's how.

I don't want to punish anyone's success. I'm a capitalist. I want everyone to be able to, if they want to be a millionaire or billionaire, to be able to seek their goal. But all I'm asking is pay your fair share. Pay your fair share. Pay your fair share and right now, many of them are paying virtually nothing.

Last year, the 55 most profitable corporations in America, 55 of them, paid zero in federal income tax on about $40 billion in profits. If they report big profits to the shareholders, they should be paying taxes. It's that simple. That's why the Build Back Better framework will have a 15 percent minimum on the largest corporations—a minimum tax of 15 percent. The top 1 percent of the wealthiest Americans evade, it's estimated by the experts, $160 billion in federal taxes. That's wrong. We're going to change that. I want to emphasize what I said from the beginning, under my plans, if you earn less than $400,000, you won't pay a single penny more in federal taxes, period. In fact, these bills continue cutting taxes for middle class, for childcare for health care, so much more.

Big close is this: For much too long, working people of this nation and the middle class of this country have been dealt out of the American deal. It's time to deal them back in. I ran for president saying it was time to reduce the burden on the middle class, to rebuild the backbone of this nation, working people in the middle class. I couldn't have been any clearer. From the very moment I announced my candidacy. That's why I wrote these bills in the first place and took them to the people, who campaigned on them. The American people spoke. This agenda—the agenda that's in these bills is what 81 million Americans voted for. More people voted than any time in American history. That's what they voted for and their voices deserve to be heard, not denied. Or worse ignored.

You see here's what I know. We make these investments and there will be no stopping the American people or America. We will own the future. I've long said it's never been a good bet to bet against the American people. I've said that to foreign leaders as well as everyone here in this country, which means it's always a good bet to bet in the American people. Just give them half a chance. And that's what we're doing.

That's what these plans do. They're about betting on America, about believing in America, about believing in the capacity of the American people. You look at the history the journey of this nation, what becomes crystal clear is this— I'll say it again, given half a chance, the American people have never ever, ever, ever let the country down.

So let's get this done. God bless you all and may God protect our troops and I'll see you in Italy and in Scotland. Thank you.