Nati Harnik/AP Photo
On Wednesday, President Biden will lay out his ambitious plan to ‘Build Back Better.’
Tomorrow, President Biden travels to Pittsburgh to unveil his landmark proposal to rebuild America better. In the historic home of the American steel industry, Biden will lay out many of the particulars of his $3-to-$4 trillion bills to shore up the nation’s decrepit roads, bridges, water systems, power grids, and such; to substitute clean energy for our fossil fuel–reliant system that threatens the planet’s livability; to build energy-efficient affordable housing; to recharge American manufacturing; to fund a care-economy infrastructure (universal pre-K, free community college, child care); and to pay for most of this with the greatest boost to tax progressivity since World War II.
He will, of course, do more than lay out the particulars. He’ll make the case. He’ll say that we’re a nation that has allowed itself to decline during the past four decades of physical infrastructure decay, wage stagnation, cascading inequality, and declining intergenerational mobility, perhaps even noting that all the while China has become the world’s other great power by investing in infrastructure and raising incomes while we have not. China, he has already said in last week’s press conference, now is claiming that autocracy delivers for its citizens better than democracy has delivered for ours. He probably won’t say what I said last week in writing about his press conference: that in their opposition to what the Whigs once called “internal improvements,” today’s Republicans have effectively become China’s “useful idiots”—an earlier generation of Communists’ term for Americans and other Westerners who favored policies that helped the Soviet Union, though they themselves believed they were anti-Communist.
Biden clearly understands what perhaps was the fundamental mistake of the Obama administration: securing, in its $787 billion stimulus bill, a beginning of an effective economic policy, but then failing to tell Americans how it positively affected them—which meant foreclosing any possibility for following it up with a more adequate stimulus. Americans received significant tax relief from that package, but rather than send it to them in a visible check, the Obama-ites opted to slightly reduce the payroll tax deduction on biweekly checks, making the reduction all but imperceptible. Signs on infrastructure improvements that read “Obama Stimulus Funds at Work” were never made. The failure to publicize these achievements was one of the reasons that the Democrats lost Congress in 2010.
So tomorrow’s Pittsburgh speech must be only the beginning of this administration’s campaign to explain and make the case for its initiative. Biden must traverse the Midwest laying out the jobs that will be created and the union-level wages they will come with; he must also talk about his proposed investment and tax changes that will favor domestic rather than overseas manufacturing. He should travel to Texas to explain how his legislation will upgrade the state’s power grid and water systems that failed during the winter’s cold snap. He should lay out his plans for solar energy, and the jobs they will create, when he’s in Arizona and Nevada. And so should Vice President Harris and a host of Cabinet members.
Hit the road, Joe, and don’t you come back with anything less than 70 percent support for your proposals. It’s out there if you can make the case.
