Biden Rolls Out $2-trillion Plan For Jobs And Infrastructure

President Joe Biden has rolled out the first part of his sweeping $2 trillion infrastructure and jobs plan that would be spent out over an eight-year period.

Speaking at Carpenters Pittsburgh Training Center in Pittsburgh, Biden said he plans to raise the fund to implement the proposal by increasing corporate tax rate to 28 percent and eliminating tax breaks for fossil fuels.

“No one should be able to complain about that. It’s still lower than what that rate was between World War II and 2017. Just doing that one thing will generate $1 trillion in additional revenue over 15 years,” he said.

“Today, we have a broken tax system that was made worse by the 2017 tax law,” Biden said, referring to President Donald cutting corporate taxes significantly. “We’ve seen the average tax rate for U.S. multinationals, in the wake of that law, fall from 16 percent to 8 percent”.

Coupling the proposal for the American Jobs Plan with a Made in America Corporate Tax Reform Plan, the Biden administration aims to offset the full cost of this plan over 15 years.

This and other provisions of the Plan would raise about a half a percent of GDP per year in corporate revenue, it is estimated.

A recent study found that 91 Fortune 500 companies paid $0 in federal taxes on U.S. income in 2018. Another study found that the average corporation paid just 8 percent in taxes. President Biden believes that profitable corporations should not be able to get away with paying little or no tax by shifting jobs and profits overseas.

The plan will require that goods and materials are made in America and shipped on U.S.-flag, U.S.-crewed vessels.

The President’s plan will modernize 20,000 miles of highways, roads, and main-streets. It will reconstruct the ten most economically significant bridges in the country, and repair the worst 10,000 smaller bridges. And, it will replace thousands of buses and rail cars, repair hundreds of stations, renew airports, and expand transit and rail into new communities.

The plan also aims to deliver clean drinking water, a renewed electric grid, and high-speed broadband to all Americans.

There will be a focus on making the infrastructure of the future more resilient to climate change. The President said he is committed to target 40 percent of the benefits of these clean infrastructure investments to disadvantaged communities.

This plan would do a generational investment in upgrading and reorienting power infrastructure in the country for the carbon-free electric future. It would invest in building, renovating, and retrofitting more than 2 million homes and housing units, which would put people to work in construction jobs.

In addition, there will be significant investment in repairs of schools, community colleges, childcare facilities, federal buildings, and veteran hospital system.

The plan includes historic investments in R&D, in clean energy R&D, and providing incentives for domestic production for manufacturing semiconductors, batteries in clean energy technologies, and for other areas identified as important to American supply chains.

Biden is expected to unveil the second part of the package focusing on the “care economy” in coming weeks.

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