“The American Jobs Initiative has been called the largest domestic public investment since the United States built the interstate highway and won the space race. The White House says the plan will create millions of good jobs and “unite and mobilize the entire country to address the great challenges of our Time – the climate crisis and the ambitions of a tyrannical China.”
In Pittsburgh, Biden said, “Our infrastructure is crumbling.” Pittsburgh is the second most populous city in Pennsylvania and has emerged from the shadow created by the decline of the U.S. steel industry.
“This will create the strongest, most resilient and innovative economy in the world,” Biden said of his American Jobs Initiative.
Biden said the program would give the United States a competitive advantage over the Chinese Communist Party.
“Our adversaries are worried about us building this critical infrastructure,” he said. He mentioned that the decline in U.S. gross domestic product means that “the rest of the world is closing in, and closing in fast.”
According to government data, the U.S. economy shrank by 3.5 percent in 2020 due to the new crown Epidemic.
What’s in the $2 trillion infrastructure plan?
According to the details of the American Jobs Plan released by the White House, the plan includes a $621 billion investment to build and improve America’s transportation infrastructure. This includes modernizing 20,000 miles of highways and major streets, rehabilitating 10 of the most economically valuable bridges and 10,000 of the worst bridges, upgrading thousands of buses and rail cars, rehabilitating and upgrading hundreds of stations, airports, and ports, and expanding transit and rail to new communities.
The plan would also replace all lead pipes in drinking water systems, update the electric grid, lay thousands of miles of transmission lines, seal thousands of abandoned oil, gas, and mining wells, ensure that all Americans have high-speed broadband, build, preserve, and renovate more than 2 million residential and commercial buildings, modernize public elementary and secondary schools, community colleges, and early Education facilities, upgrade veterans’ hospitals and federal government buildings, increase investment in the caregiving industry, raise wages for workers who provide Home care for seniors and people with disabilities, increase investment in science and technology research and development, support manufacturing and small businesses, enhance training for American workers, and ensure workers’ rights to join unions and bargain collectively with their employers.
Where does it specifically mention competition with the Chinese Communist Party?
Biden’s “American Jobs Plan” also makes several specific references to competition with the Chinese Communist Party.
First, when it comes to investment in the electric vehicle industry, the plan notes that the U.S. market for plug-in electric vehicles (EVs) is only one-third that of China’s, and that “that has to change. Biden proposed investing $174 billion to “win the electric vehicle market. This includes building 500,000 EV charging stations by 2030, expanding the excise tax incentive for EV purchases, replacing 20 percent of school buses with EVs and accelerating the electrification of the federal fleet through federal procurement.
Second, when it comes to investing in technology research and development, America Works notes that the U.S. is one of the few major economies where public investment in R&D as a percentage of GDP has declined over the past 25 years, and that “countries like China are investing heavily in R&D. ” China now ranks second in the world in R&D spending. Biden called on Congress to invest $180 billion to boost U.S. leadership in key technologies such as artificial intelligence, biotechnology, semiconductors, advanced computing, communications technology and clean energy, and to upgrade the research infrastructure of laboratories across the country, including physical facilities, computing power and networks. Biden’s plan also includes a $35 billion investment to achieve technological breakthroughs in climate science and make the United States a global leader in clean energy technologies.
Where will the $2 trillion come from?
The Biden Administration has proposed a plan for how to pay for this spending, the Made in America Tax Plan, along with the American Jobs Initiative.)
The tax plan will raise the U.S. corporate tax rate from the current 21% to 28%, and also contains a series of tax reform initiatives to combat corporate tax avoidance through tax loopholes, increase the tax burden on multinational companies investing and making profits overseas, and encourage multinational companies to bring jobs back to the United States. The plan also eliminates policy preferences for the fossil fuel industry in the current tax code and requires polluting industries to make payments to the Super Trust Fund to “fairly cover the cost of cleanup.
The White House said its tax reform plan would make spending on infrastructure programs fully reimbursable over the next 15 years, and would even bring down the deficit thereafter.
Democrats hope to use the infrastructure plan to promote economic transformation?
Analysts believe that Biden’s “American Jobs Plan” is not only limited to the improvement of traditional infrastructure, but also reflects the Democratic Party’s desire to promote the transformation of the United States to a new clean energy economy.
Rick Geddes, director of Cornell University’s infrastructure policy program, told the Voice of America: “A lot of the provisions in the plan involve electrification of the transportation network, subsidizing and promoting electric vehicles, charging stations, renewable energy, and so on. So it’s absolutely safe to say that one of the goals of this plan is to drive the transition to clean energy in the United States.”
Biden has previously pledged to get the U.S. to net zero emissions by 2050 and 100 percent clean electricity by 2035.
The details of the American Jobs Plan show that these Biden promises are indeed embedded in the entire infrastructure plan: the plan includes revamping infrastructure to make it more “resilient” to extreme weather and energy efficient; increasing research and development of cutting-edge clean technologies; modernizing the The plan also proposes a “clean power standard” that would require a certain percentage of U.S. electricity to be generated from zero-carbon sources; it also proposes a $46 billion federal procurement program for government The plan also proposes a $46 billion federal procurement program for government agencies to purchase electric vehicles, and a $16 billion program to help fossil fuel workers transition to new jobs, among other things.
U.S. clean energy and environmental advocacy groups have given Biden’s plan mixed reviews, with some arguing that Biden’s plan would have a transformative impact on accelerating the U.S. transition to a clean energy economy, while others say it is just the beginning.
Biden’s Infrastructure Plan Faces Republican Opposition
Analysis suggests that the Biden administration split the economic recovery plan into two parts because they believe the part involving infrastructure development is more likely to gain Republican support and easier to pass in Congress. However, while there is a broad consensus in Washington to improve U.S. infrastructure, politicians have been fighting for years over which projects the federal government should fund and how much to contribute and how to fund them. Republicans have raised many grievances about Biden’s proposed plan.
Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell called Biden’s plan “clearly not an infrastructure plan,” but a “Trojan horse. He said, “It’s called an infrastructure plan, but what’s really in this Trojan horse is more borrowing and a massive tax increase on all productive sectors of our economy.”
Republicans have long harbored concerns about the size of Biden’s infrastructure plan. They prefer a smaller infrastructure package that focuses on traditional infrastructure issues like roads and bridges, and they want to do it without raising taxes.
White House officials said Wednesday that they expect to take “some time” to negotiate with Congress on the “American Jobs Initiative.
Previously, it was reported that the Biden administration hoped the American Jobs Initiative would make progress in Congress by May 31 and be passed in the summer. Congressional Democrats are considering using the “budget reconciliation” process again, which would allow the bill to bypass the lengthy debate on the legislation and break through with a simple majority without any Republican support. However, West Virginia’s Democratic U.S. Senator Joe Manchin (Joe Manchin) and other moderate Democrats have spoken out against the use of “budget reconciliation” in the bill. They believe the Biden administration should try to seek bipartisan support.
In his speech on Wednesday, President Biden said he would listen to Republicans on the American Jobs Initiative and called for bipartisan unity, even stressing that it involves a battle between democracy and tyranny.
In his Pittsburgh speech, President Biden again referred to the notion that the Communist Party is “eating our lunch” in the infrastructure sector. “Eating someone’s lunch” is an English expression that means to take business away from or beat a competitor.
“Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think you can find a Republican in the House or Senate today who doesn’t think we should improve our infrastructure. They know that the Chinese Communist Party and other countries are eating our lunch. So there’s no reason why it can’t be bipartisan again,” President Biden said. “There are a lot of autocrats in this world today who think that democracy can no longer reach consensus, and autocracy can, so they’re going to win. That’s the nature of the competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party and the rest of the world. The basic question is, can democracy still benefit the people, can it still form a majority opinion? I think it can, and I think we have to do it.”
Analysts believe the infrastructure plan has the potential to be one of the Biden administration’s most significant political legacies. Both of Biden’s predecessors – President Obama and President Trump – made major promises on the issue, but both failed to deliver.
The Biden administration will launch the second part of its economic recovery plan, the Families USA program, in a few weeks. The plan is expected to focus on investments in child care, health care and education.
Recent Comments