Biden the builder sets out on tech road
$2.3t infrastructure plan heavy on green, digital themes, but opponents lining up
The White House released a $2.3 trillion infrastructure plan on Wednesday that looks to a greener future by allocating more money to electric-vehicle development than to traditional projects such as roads and bridges.
In fact, infrastructure is not part of the sweeping plan’s name. It is called the American Jobs Plan, and it proposes spending billions of dollars on funding the “care economy”, worker training, affordable housing, upgrading public school buildings, supporting community colleges, helping labor unions, expanding high-speed internet and creating a Civilian Climate Corps.
“It’s a once-in-a-generation investment in America unlike anything we’ve seen or done since we built the interstate highway system and the space race decades ago,” US President Joe Biden said at a carpenters union training center in Pittsburgh on Wednesday, in outlining the plan. “In fact, it’s the largest American jobs investment since World War II.”
The voluminous proposal was released early on Wednesday on the White House website.
Biden will ask Congress to put $400 billion toward “expanding access to quality, affordable homeor community-based care for aging relatives and people with disabilities”. The White House says the funding will create “well-paying caregiving jobs with benefits”.
The plan includes $300 billion toward boosting manufacturing, particularly in semiconductors, the medical sector and for clean manufacturing.
Affordable housing will see an allocation of $213 billion. There will be $100 billion appropriated for high-speed internet broadband.
The top four transportation-related categories will be electric-vehicle incentives ($174 billion), followed by roads and bridges ($115 billion), public transit ($85 billion), and passenger and freight railways ($80 billion).
Included in the plan provided by the White House are grants for governments and private groups to build 500,000 electric-vehicle chargers and replace 50,000 diesel-fueled vehicles. The initiative is geared at pushing the country away from internal combustion engines.
Amtrak, a sentimental favorite of Biden’s when he rode the passenger railway from Delaware to Washington, will receive $80 billion to help with a backlog on repairs and to modernize the heavily traveled Northeast Corridor.
Modernizing bridges
The plan would modernize 32,000 kilometers of highways and roads, the top 10 “economically significant bridges” and 10,000 other bridges.
Included is $25 billion for airports, $17 billion for inland waterways, coastal ports and ferries, and investments in cleaning port air pollution.
The Democratic president’s projects would be financed by higher corporate taxes — a trade-off that could lead to resistance from the business community and thwart attempts to work with Republicans lawmakers. Biden hopes to pass the infrastructure plan by the summer, which could mean relying solely on the slim Democratic majorities in the House of Representatives and the Senate.
“I’m going to bring Republicans into the Oval Office, listen to them, what they have to say and be open to other ideas,” Biden said. “We’ll have a good faith negotiation. Any Republican who wants to help get this done. But we have to get it done.”
Biden’s efforts could be complicated by demands from a handful of Democratic lawmakers who say they cannot support the bill unless it also addresses a $10,000 cap on individuals’ state and local tax, or SALT, deductions put in place under the administration of Donald Trump and a Republican-led Congress.
With a narrow majority in the House, they could conceivably quash any bill that doesn’t significantly lift the cap or repeal it entirely.
“We say No SALT, no deal,” said Democratic representatives Tom Suozzi of New York and Bill Pascrell and Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey in a joint statement. New Jersey has the highest property taxes in the country, and both states have high-cost housing.
Funding the first $2.3 trillion for construction and “hard” infrastructure projects would be an increase on corporate taxes that would raise the necessary sum over 15 years and then reduce the deficit over time. Biden would undo a signature policy of the Trump administration by raising the corporate tax rate to 28 percent from the 21 percent rate set in a 2017 overhaul.
US Chamber of Commerce Executive Vice-President and Chief Policy Officer Neil Bradley said in a statement: “We applaud the Biden administration for making infrastructure a top priority. However, we believe the proposal is dangerously misguided when it comes to how to pay for infrastructure.”