Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., removed a provision that would require the poor to start paying federal income tax from his revised platform after coming under fire from fellow Republicans.
The proposal was included in the original version of Scott’s 11 point diet, which he released in February and pushed as a possible plan for the Republican Party to retake the Senate this fall.
“All Americans would have to pay a little income tax to get in the game,” an earlier version of the plan said.
Scott, who chairs the Republican National Senate Committee, adjusted his “Plan to Save America” on Thursday, replacing the tax proposal with one focused on people under 60.
“Able-bodied Americans under 60, who do not have young children or disabled dependents, should work. We need them to pull the wagon and pay taxes, not sit at home taking money from the government,” the updated agenda said. “Right now, far too many Americans who can work live hard work of others and have no ‘skin in the game’. The government must never again encourage people not to work by paying them more to stay at home.”
The revisions, made on a day when most of the media attention is focused on the House committee’s first public hearing on Jan. 6, came after Democrats seized on the plan, featuring the tax proposal in party advertisements.
The Democratic Senate Campaign Committee field-tested Scott’s plan this year with swing-state voters and found strong aversion to the tax hike language.
Last month, President Joe Biden called the plan an “ultra-MAGA agenda.”
“Under this new plan, while big business and billionaires would pay nothing more, working-class people are going to pay a lot more,” he tweeted at the time.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., also rejected Scott’s agenda.
“Let me tell you what wouldn’t be part of our program,” he said in March. “We wouldn’t have on our agenda a bill that would raise taxes on half the American people and take away Social Security and Medicare within five years. That won’t be part of a majority program of the Republican Senate.
NBC News has reached out to Scott’s office for comment.
