If you had told me two years ago that Joe Biden would be president, and that he would follow up the most progressive spending plan since the New Deal with another ambitious plan to rebuild the nation's crumbling infrastructure, I never would have believed you. But here we are.
Yes, hot on the heel of the stimulus, Biden has now released another big spending plan that proposes to spend around two trillion dollars, paid for by an increase by fifteen years of an increased corporate tax rate.
The plan basically breaks down into three broad areas of spending: the first is in basic infrastructure, that is, one hundred and fifteen billion dollars for roads and bridges, fifty billion for disaster resilience, twenty billion to improve road safety, and so on. Honestly, it's hard to argue against this kind of spending. Clearly the public needs decent roads and bridges, and the American Society of Civil Engineers consistently gives the public low marks on that score. Even conservatives know this, remember Trump's pathetic attempts to have an "infrastructure week"? Another piece of this is an investment in domestic manufacturing and other jobs programs, which, again, should be something that the "America first" crowd should support.
It's the other two branches of the spending proposal that will cause anger from the right: the first is basically the green new deal, that is, an attempt to shift the country away from gas, oil and coal reliance. So there's one hundred and seventy four billion dollars for electric vehicle incentives, eighty five billion for public transit, and another hundred billion dollars for electric grids and clean energy. Some people on the left have already complained that isn't enough, but certainly it's a good start, and it shows a clear design of intent, a blueprint to move into renewable energy sources to do something about climate change. And the spending plan also includes forty billion dollars for new dislocated worker program, to help out people who work in the oil and coal industries. Obviously the Republican party, with their donations from oil and coal companies, would prefer that America continue to do ignore climate change, but with more and more Americans seeing the urgency of the problem (and the evidence of climate change getting worse with each passing year of record setting natural disasters), this seems like common sense spending.
Finally, there is what appears to be an attempt to undo the terrible legacy of red lining, that practice dating back to the nineteen thirties in which city planners would make sure that poor neighborhoods of color were given the bare minimum of government spending on infrastructure. So there's over two hundred billion for affordable housing, one hundred billion for public schools, forty billion for lead pipe removal, and twenty billion dollars to help out underserved communities. And there's a very interesting part that calls for four hundred billion dollars to expand access to caregiving for those who are older and those with disabilities, and to improve pay and benefits for caregivers; most of those caregivers are poorly paid women of color. It's safe to imagine that the Republican party will oppose much of this spending, and get ready to hear cries of "reparations!" on the floors of congress when the proposal is debated. Which is a shame because these kinds of improvements in poorer neighborhoods will eventually benefit all of America when healthier, better educated children grow up to join the economy.
While the proposal is obviously not a done deal yet, and the inevitable unified Republican opposition will mean that all the Democrats in the Senate will have to support it, it certainly a bold first step in both moving the country into a greener future while also improving the lives of millions of poor and middle class people. The amazing thing about this proposal is that it is truly progressive in that it literally taxes the rich to help the poor, finally reversing the era of tax cuts for the rich and spending cuts on social programs that Ronald Reagan ushered in back in the eighties. It's taken a long time, but a plan like this can reverse the widening gulf between the rich and the poor in this country.
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