While at the beginning of his presidency Donald Trump passed the largest tax cut in American history yesterday, at the beginning of his term, Joe Biden has come up with a bold plan to prop up the economy by raising taxes on the rich and on businesses.
A brave plan that touches the open nerve of the Republicans and that could only pass in Congress now with the president enjoying great popularity for his formidable work against the Coronavirus.
And the President launched this proposed two trillion dollar plan in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In the same place where his presidential campaign started two years ago. A city that is an icon at the heart of the country’s industrial revolution. In the capital of steel and coal mines, but also the symbol of a great reconversion in technology and healthcare.
A truly revolutionary plan for the recent American years. Innovative because it will be financed not by increasing the deficit but by increasing taxes on the rich and on businesses.
Joe Biden’s first hit was a plan to overcome the pandemic, a $ 1.9 trillion stimulus package. The second is a program for the reconstruction and modernization of infrastructure with investments of two trillion dollars over eight years that will create millions of jobs.
The goal is to rebuild roads, bridges, airports or the electricity grid, many of the 1950s, and to modernize the country to better cope with climate change. But the real goal is to maintain US supremacy against China.
The American Employment Plan the president said is “the largest investment plan since World War II, which will create millions of high-paying jobs, but has a winding political and legislative road.”
Difficult because it provides for an increase in corporate tax from the current 21% to 28%. Republican opposition is taken for granted.
The initiative plans to allocate $ 620,000 million in the transportation sector to modernize more than 32,000 kilometers of roads and highways and repair approximately 10,000 bridges across the country. According to the Association of Civil Engineers, 43% of the roads are in poor condition, while 42% of the 617,000 bridges are at least 50 years old. 7.5% of them are structurally deficient.
In addition to the road network, the modernization of the electricity network, water supply or economic access to broadband Internet is planned.
We also want to rebuild two million houses and buildings, schools and kindergartens; strengthen the care economy by creating better-paying jobs; revitalize the manufacturing industry, ensure the supply of essential components and invest more in research and development.
The so-called “electric car revolution” is also planned, which includes, among other things, replacing 20% of school buses with electric vehicles.
The ambitious goal is the starting point of a hard and uncertain congressional battle that will test Biden’s diplomatic skills.
In Biden’s mind two objectives: blue-collar workers, those most affected by the gradual economic decline, divestment and, finally, the pandemic; mostly blacks and latins, but also low-skilled whites, who work hard, pay taxes and serve their country and then the global challenge against the Chinese rival. The macro plan on infrastructure and employment closed Biden “will allow us to win the competition against China”. The war for the throne of the world’s number one country has begun.