The American Jobs Plan
For the last 40 years our government has been run on the cheap following President Reagan’s anti-tax philosophy of “star ving the beast.” To quote the White House: “The American Jobs Plan will invest in America in a way we have not invested since we built the interstate highways and won the Space Race. … After decades of disinvestment, our roads, bridges, and water systems are crumbling. Our electric grid is vulnerable to catastrophic outages.”
The $2 trillion plan is 20 pages long once downloaded and printed. Here are some key provisions (paraphrased from the plan):
Fix highways, rebuild bridges, upgrade por ts, airpor ts and transit systems. Create good jobs electrifying vehicles. Make our infrastructure more resilient to climate change. Rebuild clean drinking water infrastructure. Provide high-speed broadband to all Americans. Spur jobs modernizing power generation and delivering clean electricity.
Build, preser ve, and retrofit more than 2 million homes and commercial buildings. Modernize our nation’s schools, community colleges, and early learning facilities. Upgrade veterans’ hospitals and federal buildings.
Solidify the infrastructure of our care economy by creating jobs and raising wages and benefits for essential home care workers. Invest in research and development. Revitalize manufacturing and small businesses.
Train Americans for the jobs of the future. Partner with rural and tribal communities to create jobs and economic growth in rural America.
Create good-quality jobs that pay prevailing wages.
We have been taught that all taxes are bad and going into debt was unforgivable. Yet, 40 years of operating on the cheap and not valuing our taxes have led us to a point where a massive infrastructure proposal is mandator y. It is big thinking akin to government-sponsored programs like the “New Deal” or ramping up the economy to fight in World War II.
No matter how many times the “loyal opposition” claims the government’s budget should be balanced and the debt ceiling not be increased, that has happened only once in the past 40 years and then under Bill Clinton, a Democrat.
You may remember the old Fram oil filter commercial where the announcer would say “You can pay me now, or pay me later.” Our countr y is now at the point where we need more than a new oil filter. We need a new transmission, new tires and a new engine. Plus, a new paint job wouldn’t hur t.
President Biden proposes to pay for this plan by fixing the corporate tax code to provide incentive for job creation and investment here in the United States, and to stop unfair and wasteful profit shifting to tax havens.
This tax plan will: Set the corporate tax rate at 28 percent; discourage offshoring; prevent U.S. corporations from claiming tax havens as their residence; deny expense deductions for of fshoring; eliminate a loophole for intellectual property; enact a minimum tax on large corporations’ book income; eliminate tax preferences for fossil fuels; and, ramp up enforcement by the IRS.
These “repairs” have been put off for over 40 years and the time has come to pay up. No more kicking the can down the road, especially when raising taxes on corporations will pay of f these costs in 15 years.
The 2018 tax cut gave massive relief to the wealthy and corporations. The ver y opposite should have happened. It is obscene that 91 Fortune 500 companies pay no taxes.
Finally, the jobs/infrastructure proposal is an investment in us. We are not a second rate countr y, and it’s time we stopped acting like one. The GOP economic philosophy of money trickling down from the wealthy was debunked long ago. President Biden’s infrastructure plan is a step toward guiding the economy to benefit those in the middle and below.
Bill Ellis is an author and Longmont resident. Reply to bill-ellis@comcast.net.