Biden to propose infrastructure plan to create
jobs and combat climate change
Joe
Biden will deliver a speech today in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to lay out his
$2tn infrastructure proposal, the next plank of his “Build Back Better” agenda.
The
Guardian’s Lauren Gambino has more details on the proposal:
Biden’s
plan ... includes ‘historic and galvanizing’ investments in traditional
infrastructure projects such as roads, bridges and highways, as well as
hundreds of billions of dollars to fortify the electricity grid, expand
high-speed broadband and rebuild water systems to ensure access to clean
drinking water, an administration official said on Tuesday. It also seeks to
expand access to community care facilities for seniors and people with
disabilities and invest in research and development and workplace training.
He will
propose paying for the new spending with a substantial increase on corporate
taxes that would offset eight years of spending over the course of 15 years,
officials said. Among the changes, Biden will call for a rise in the corporate
tax rate to 28% from 21% and measures to force multinational corporations to
pay more taxes in the US on profits earned abroad. The tax plan would unwind
major pieces of Donald Trump’s tax-cut law, which lowered the corporate tax
rate from 35% to 21%.
Those
payment proposals will likely deter most, if not all, congressional Republicans
from supporting the package, given that many of them have already said they
oppose rolling back the Trump-era tax cuts.
The
White House has indicated it hopes the infrastructure plan will gain bipartisan
support in Congress, after Biden’s coronavirus relief package passed without
the assistance of a single Republican.
But
Democrats appear to also be ready to go it alone if Republicans attempt to
obstruct the the passage of the legislation, which administration officials are
hoping to pass by this summer.
Biden’s
speech will get underway this afternoon, and the blog will have more updates
and analysis before then, so stay tuned.
Biden Details $2 Trillion Plan to Rebuild
Infrastructure and Reshape the Economy
The president will begin selling his proposal on
Wednesday, saying it would fix 20,000 miles of roads and 10,000 bridges, while
also addressing climate change and racial inequities and raising corporate
taxes.
Jim
Tankersley
By Jim
Tankersley
March 31,
2021
Updated
9:28 a.m. ET
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/31/business/economy/biden-infrastructure-plan.html
WASHINGTON
— President Biden will unveil an infrastructure plan on Wednesday whose $2
trillion price tag would translate into 20,000 miles of rebuilt roads, repairs
to the 10 most economically important bridges in the country, the elimination
of lead pipes and service lines from the nation’s water supplies and a long
list of other projects intended to create millions of jobs in the short run and
strengthen American competitiveness in the long run.
Biden
administration officials said the proposal, which they detailed in a 25-page
briefing paper and which Mr. Biden will discuss in an afternoon speech in Pittsburgh,
would also accelerate the fight against climate change by hastening the shift
to new, cleaner energy sources, and would help promote racial equity in the
economy.
The
spending in the plan would take place over eight years, officials said. Unlike
the economic stimulus passed under President Barack Obama in 2009, when Mr.
Biden was vice president, officials will not in every case prioritize so-called
shovel ready projects that could quickly bolster growth.
But even
spread over years, the scale of the proposal underscores how fully Mr. Biden
has embraced the opportunity to use federal spending to address longstanding
social and economic challenges in a way not seen in half a century. Officials
said that, if approved, the spending in the plan would end decades of
stagnation in federal investment in research and infrastructure — and would return
government investment in those areas, as a share of the economy, to its highest
levels since the 1960s.
The proposal
is the first half of what will be a two-step release of the president’s
ambitious agenda to overhaul the economy and remake American capitalism, which
could carry a total cost of as much as $4 trillion over the course of a decade.
Mr. Biden’s administration has named it the “American Jobs Plan,” echoing the
$1.9 trillion pandemic relief bill that Mr. Biden signed into law this month,
the “American Rescue Plan.”
“The
American Jobs Plan,” White House officials wrote in the document detailing it,
“will invest in America in a way we have not invested since we built the
interstate highways and won the Space Race.”
While
spending on roads, bridges and other physical improvements to the nation’s
economic foundations has always had bipartisan appeal, Mr. Biden’s plan is sure
to draw intense Republican opposition, both for its sheer size and for its
reliance on corporate tax increases to pay for it.
Administration
officials said the tax increases in the plan — including an increase in the
corporate tax rate and a variety of measures to tax multinationals on money
they earn and book overseas — would take 15 years to fully offset the cost of
the spending programs.
The
spending in the plan covers a wide range of physical infrastructure projects,
including transportation, broadband, the electric grid and housing; efforts to
jump-start advanced manufacturing; and other industries officials see as key to
the United States’ growing economic competition with China. It also includes
money to train millions of workers, as well as money for initiatives to support
labor unions and providers of in-home care for older and disabled Americans,
while also increasing the pay of the workers who provide that care.
Many of the
items in the plan carry price tags that would have filled entire, ambitious
bills in past administrations.
Among them:
a total of $180 billion for research and development, $115 billion for roads
and bridges, $85 billion for public transit, and $80 billion for Amtrak and
freight rail. There is $42 billion for ports and airports, $100 billion for
broadband and $111 billion for water infrastructure — including $45 billion to
ensure no child ever is forced to drink water from a lead pipe, which can slow
children’s development and lead to behavioral and other problems.
The plan
seeks to repair 10,000 smaller bridges across the country, along with the 10
most economically significant ones in need of a fix. It would electrify 20
percent of the nation’s fleet of yellow school buses. It would spend $300
billion to promote advanced manufacturing, including a four-year plan to
restock the country’s Strategic National Stockpile of pharmaceuticals,
including vaccines, in preparation for future pandemics.
In many
cases, officials cast those goals in the language of closing racial gaps in the
economy, sometimes the result of previous federal spending efforts, like
interstate highway developments that split communities of color or air
pollution that affects Black and Hispanic communities near ports or power
plants.
Officials
cast the $400 billion spending on in-home care in part as a salve to “underpaid
and undervalued” workers in that industry, who are disproportionately women of
color.
Mr. Biden’s
pledge to tackle climate change is embedded throughout the plan. Roads, bridges
and airports would be made more resilient to the effects of more extreme
storms, floods and fires wrought by a warming planet. Spending on research and
development could help spur breakthroughs in cutting-edge clean technology,
while plans to retrofit and weatherize millions of buildings would make them
more energy efficient.
The
president’s focus on climate change is centered, however, on modernizing and
transforming the United States’ two largest sources of planet-warming
greenhouse gas pollution: cars and electric power plants.
A decade
ago, Mr. Obama’s economic stimulus plan spent about $90 billion on clean energy
programs intended to jump-start the nation’s nascent renewable power and
electric vehicle industries. Mr. Biden’s plan now proposes spending magnitudes
more on similar programs that he hopes will take those technologies fully into
the mainstream.
It bets
heavily on spending meant to increase the use of electric cars, which today
make up just 2 percent of the vehicles on America’s highways.
The plan
proposes spending $174 billion to encourage the manufacture and purchase of
electric vehicles by granting tax credits and other incentives to companies
that make electric vehicle batteries in the United States instead of China. The
goal is to reduce vehicle price tags.
The money
would also fund the construction of about a half-million electric vehicle
charging stations — although experts say that number is but a tiny fraction of
what is needed to make electric vehicles a mainstream option.
Mr. Biden’s
plan proposes $100 billion in programs to update and modernize the electric
grid to make it more reliable and less susceptible to blackouts, like those
that recently devastated Texas, while also building more transmission lines
from wind and solar plants to large cities.
It proposes
the creation of a “Clean Electricity Standard” — essentially, a federal mandate
requiring that a certain percentage of electricity in the United States be
generated by zero-carbon energy sources like wind, solar and possibly nuclear
power. But that mandate would have to be enacted by Congress, where prospects
for its success remain murky. Similar efforts to pass such a mandate have
failed multiple times over the past 20 years.
The plan
proposes an additional $46 billion in federal procurement programs for
government agencies to buy fleets of electric vehicles, and $35 billion in
research and development programs for cutting-edge, new technologies.
It also
calls for making infrastructure and communities more prepared for the worsening
effects of climate change, though the administration has so far provided few
details on how it would accomplish that goal.
But
according to the document released by the White House, the plan includes $50
billion “in dedicated investments to improve infrastructure resilience.” The
efforts would defend against wildfires, rising seas and hurricanes, and there
would be a focus on investments that protect low-income residents and people of
color.
The plan
also includes a $16 billion program intended to help fossil fuel workers
transition to new work — like capping leaks on defunct oil wells and shutting
down retired coal mines — and $10 billion for a new “Civilian Climate Corps.”
Mr. Biden
would fund his spending in part by eliminating tax preferences for fossil fuel
producers. But the bulk of his tax increases would come from corporations
generally.
He would
raise the corporate tax rate to 28 percent from 21 percent, partly reversing a
cut signed into law by President Donald J. Trump. Mr. Biden would also take a
variety of steps to raise taxes on multinational corporations, many of them
working within an overhaul of the taxation of profits earned overseas that was
included in Mr. Trump’s tax law in 2017.
Those
measures would include raising the rate of a minimum tax on global profits and
eliminating several provisions that allow companies to reduce their American
tax liability on profits they earn and book abroad.
Mr. Biden
would also add a new minimum tax on the global income of the largest
multinationals, and he would ramp up enforcement efforts by the Internal
Revenue Service against large companies that evade taxes.
Administration
officials expressed hope this week that the plan could attract bipartisan
support in Congress. But Republicans and business groups have already attacked
Mr. Biden’s plans to fund the spending with corporate tax increases, which they
say will hurt the competitiveness of American companies. Administration
officials say the moves will push companies to keep profits and jobs in the
United States.
Joshua
Bolten, the president and chief executive of the Business Roundtable, a
powerful group representing top business executives in Washington, said on
Tuesday that his group “strongly opposes corporate tax increases as a pay-for
for infrastructure investment.”
“Policymakers
should avoid creating new barriers to job creation and economic growth,” Mr.
Bolten said, “particularly during the recovery.”
Coral
Davenport and Christopher Flavelle contributed reporting.
Jim
Tankersley is a White House correspondent with a focus on economic policy. He
has written for more than a decade in Washington about the decline of
opportunity for American workers, and is the author of "The Riches of This
Land: The Untold, True Story of America's Middle Class." @jimtankersley
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário