The dirty politics of the “Clean” New Deal.
First, we had a COVID-19 bill that had little to do with the coronavirus, and now we have an infrastructure bill that is only passingly related to building roads, bridges, and tunnels. President Joe Biden introduced the “American Jobs Plan” on March 31st as legislation that would "reimagine" and rebuild America's economy. In reality, it is an attempt to begin delivering on Green New Deal promises and continue the Democratic agenda of transforming America from the freest nation on earth to serfdom.
If there are two things that have defined the administration of President Joe Biden since January, it is gargantuan spending and mendacity. In a misnomered COVID-19 relief bill—and now, a phony infrastructure bill—it has found a way to spend $4 trillion in what is arguably the swiftest timeline of any U.S. federal government in history. At this rate, Biden will soon have amassed a debt that compares to the total amount of government debt accrued from George Washington to Biden’s own presidency.
But President Biden’s plan is not just disingenuous; it is an ugly combination of reckless spending and social re-engineering—yet another plank in the real Biden project: to reshape America as a socialist state where everyone is dependent upon the government in some way, shape or form.
[caption id="attachment_188054" align="aligncenter" width="1920"]
Roadways.[/caption]
THE LONG AND NOBLE HISTORY OF PUBLIC WORKS PROJECTS
The “infrastructure” bill has not even been written yet. Lord knows how long the actual legislation will be in pages, but Biden has already promised us that the price tag will be almost $2.3 trillion. And how much of this legislation is actually about infrastructure as most Americans understand it? Believe it or not: less than 6%.
That’s $115 billion out of over $2 trillion. You do the math.
Fully appreciating that there would probably be some public and media interest in spending another $2 trillion, the White House wisely and helpfully prepared an executive summary, or “fact sheet” of a bill that has yet to be written. That document alone is 25 pages long. If you read it carefully, and ignore the constant repetition of the words like “infrastructure” and “roads,” you might notice that the fine print actually owns up to the deceptiveness of the bill. According to the White House, the American Jobs Plan will spend "$115 billion to modernize the bridges, highways, roads, and main streets that are in most critical need of repair.” That’s $115 billion out of over $2 trillion. You do the math.
And the remainder? Well in the minds of President Biden and his handlers, just about anything from research and development to elder care to providing public housing can qualify as infrastructure, so the administration can gleefully spend like there was no tomorrow.
The federal government has launched infrastructure projects before. It was once about the only thing the feds spent money on, after the military, the courts, and the lawmakers serving in Congress. The Republican Party was founded in part on the belief that, although the government should not interfere in the economy, it had a duty to provide public works to facilitate the better operation of that economy and to ensure that roads, bridges, and tunnels would be built to service Americans where the private sector couldn’t be bothered to do so. The Republican Party’s founding charter declared that the federal government was obliged to improve “rivers and harbors of a national character.”
Infrastructure money has always been about politics, but it has never really been about ideology or social re-engineering. How could it be? What’s ideological about a road? Both Republicans and Democrats have promised to get your highway improved. President Dwight Eisenhower greatly accelerated the growth of the interstate highways, a project that was started in 1916, but became mired in federal-state bickering over who was going to pay for the project. Ike agreed that the feds would pick up 90% of the tab, and the nation was quickly linked by one of the best highway systems in the world. The cost of that project, from its very inception, was estimated to be $129 billion in 1991 dollars.
There was little resistance to the idea from Democrats. It was just good for America, as were the jobs that came with it. It was an investment: Americans, Canadians, and Mexicans use those highways every day of the year to visit every sector of the United States. The results are still tangible, 50 or 60 years after most of those highways were first built.
But President Biden’s infrastructure project is an entirely different undertaking; it is about ideology and forcing Americans to accept the more radical demands of the climate change alarmists. Biden’s infrastructure bill is gently introducing the country to a Green New Deal that wants to eliminate air travel and ban your gasoline-operated car. Leave it to Joe, and there won’t be any traffic on the interstates.
[caption id="attachment_188053" align="aligncenter" width="1920"]
Railroads.[/caption]
SPENDING OUR WAY TO THE GREEN NEW WORLD
The Biden administration is clearly focused on spending the nation into oblivion while telling Americans that all that spending is going to a good cause. So when you’re selling a COVID-19 bill that was nothing but spending largesse for Democratic causes, keep emphasizing that the cheque is in the mail. And when you’re promoting an infrastructure plan, never forget to keep mentioning those roads and bridges, because that’s what people will remember most—even if they can’t get through the monstrous executive “summary.”
You will see the word “invest” in this plan repeated over and over again, until you begin to believe that it’s actually about that.
As Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell put it in during a news scrum following Biden’s announcement, "This plan is not about rebuilding America’s backbone. Less than 6% of this massive proposal goes to roads and bridges. It would spend more money just on electric cars than on America’s roads, bridges, ports, airports, and waterways combined."
Nonetheless, the President insists the bill is one massive “investment” in America’s future. You will see the word “invest” in this plan repeated over and over again, until you begin to believe that it’s actually about that. Governments and even corporations love to utilize this word when they really should be talking about spending. An investment, especially one this large and bankrolled by Americans, should anticipate a financial return or at least, be based on some rational or evidence-based approach. Instead, there is so much spending in this bill that the ever colorful Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) suggested, “there may be something in here for murder hornets.”
But just listen to the wild appraisal that the White House has of its legislation. And notice how it can’t resist ballyhooing the COVID-19 stimulus bill—the one that wasn’t really a COVID-19 stimulus bill.
“While the American Rescue Plan is changing the course of the pandemic and delivering relief for working families, this is no time to build back to the way things were. This is the moment to reimagine and rebuild a new economy. The American Jobs Plan is an investment in America that will create millions of good jobs, rebuild our country’s infrastructure, and position the United States to out-compete China.”
How can you “build back to the way things were” while you are creating “a new economy?” Especially if it’s one devoid of the foundational values that made America “the wealthiest country in the world” to begin with?
And that’s really the fatal flaw of this bill. When you start to talk about the new economy and the alleged “millions of good jobs” that go with it, it is often rhetoric based on speculation, rooted in hopes, and fashioned by subservience to left-wing ideology.
What kind of new jobs does Biden have in mind? Well, you might recall that his climate change czar, John Kerry, had some profound advice for all those people with high-paying jobs who were about to be unemployed as a result of the president’s executive order canceling the Keystone XL pipeline. How they could always pick up and go make solar panels...
Let’s be clear here: all those good jobs promised by this bill are supposed to magically appear in President Biden’s green new world. This is ultimately what the infrastructure bill is all about.
Here is the summary getting down to brass tacks: “The President is calling on Congress to invest $35 billion in the full range of solutions needed to achieve technology breakthroughs that address the climate crisis and position America as the global leader in clean energy technology and clean energy jobs.”
Did you notice how the Biden administration is talking about “clean energy” and not “green energy?” Good public relations move. When Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced the Green New Deal, and people began crunching the numbers, it soon became apparent that the really green element of this plan was the money it would cost: some $93 trillion. The evidence was so damning that even Joe Biden expressed hesitation about getting on board. (But give him time, those trillions are adding up.)
Instead, he has come up with what might be described as the “Clean New Deal.”
As the White House summary continues,
“This includes launching ARPA-C to develop new methods for reducing emissions and building climate resilience, as well as expanding across-the-board funding for climate research. In addition to a $5 billion increase in funding for other climate-focused research, his plan will invest $15 billion in demonstration projects for climate R&D priorities, including utility-scale energy storage, carbon capture and storage, hydrogen, advanced nuclear, rare earth element separations, floating offshore wind, biofuel/bioproducts, quantum computing, and electric vehicles, as well as strengthening U.S. technological leadership in these areas in global markets.”
And out of this, somehow, will flow all of those good-paying jobs that Biden keeps talking about.
[caption id="attachment_188051" align="aligncenter" width="1920"]
American infrastructure.[/caption]
AND BY INFRASTRUCTURE, HE MEANS ... RESEARCH INCUBATORS AT HISTORICALLY BLACK UNIVERSITIES?
Is there any social re-engineering in the plan? You just know there has to be because, to the Democrats, even an infrastructure bill has to be about changing the way Americans think and how they vote. Through his infrastructure plan, President Biden has decided to target research and development as another source of systemic racism in America. How anyone could begin to even substantiate such a claim is certainly worth a question, but the Biden plan doesn’t even attempt to solve that enigma. Instead, the infrastructure bill just makes that assumption and promises to “eliminate racial and gender inequities in research and development and science, technology, engineering, and math.”
The ideological riders are unending. There is so much money for so many projects in this plan that you really need a scorecard to keep track.
Without bothering to establish the need to eliminate these alleged inequities, the summary then suggests that “discrimination leads to less innovation and one study found that innovation in the United States will quadruple if women, people of color, and children from low-income families invented at the rate of groups who are not held back by discrimination and structural barriers.”
The summary continues,
“Persistent inequities in access to R&D dollars and to careers in innovation industries prevents the U.S. economy from reaching its full potential. President Biden is calling on Congress to make a $10 billion R&D investment at HBCUs and other MSIs. He also is calling on Congress to invest $15 billion in creating up to 200 centers of excellence that serve as research incubators at HBCUs and other MSIs to provide graduate fellowships and other opportunities for underserved populations, including through pre-college programs.”
The ideological riders are unending. There is so much money for so many projects in this plan that you really need a scorecard to keep track. Of note is the $174 billion allocated for the creation and sustenance of electric vehicles (more than the funding for actual infrastructure); $400 billion on home-based care for the elderly and disabled; $25 billion on child care facilities; $50 billion for something called "research infrastructure" at the National Science Foundation; and another $50 billion for the creation of a new Commerce Department that will be “dedicated to monitoring domestic industrial capacity.”
That last one has the potential to be a whopper of a boondoggle. How many bureaucrats does it require to monitor industrial capacity, something that numerous private sector organizations already do? Can you just imagine the potential for waste and the real possibility that this will quickly evolve into an instrument of government intervention?
As Fox News host Tucker Carlson recently said on his nightly program, President Biden’s infrastructure plan is nothing more than a noxious assembly of words delivered beneath an appealing cover. “But this is not an infrastructure bill. It is a green energy, Green New Deal, and reparations bill. It calls for tearing down a highway because the highway is racist? Probably transphobic too? If you want a reparations bill, if you want a Green New Deal, just say so and let's have the debate, but don't call it an infrastructure bill because it's not,” Carlson said.
Mr. President: if you want to sell a green energy program, please call it that. Let’s not pretend this debate is about whether it’s a good thing to pave a road.
Whether it’s infrastructure projects, COVID-19 stimulus bills, open borders, or, as we have seen with the HR 1 “For the People Act,” the Biden administration wants to profoundly change America, and it wants the Democratic Party to stay in power in perpetuity, either by buying votes or outright voter fraud.
And so far, the public is buying it. They will soon be paying through the nose for it and probably getting nothing in return.
