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When President-elect Joe Biden is sworn into office on January 20, his first task will be to distribute as many vaccines as possible to vulnerable Americans. It will undoubtedly be the metric by which many Americans will judge his competence and political skill.
Biden, however, campaigned on a much broader agenda than just his COVID-19 pandemic plan. He also proposed a robust economic stimulus package to create jobs and revitalize the economy.
“I attended infrastructure rallies at Trump’s request, but eventually concluded that Trump’s approach was rhetoric, not reality.”
Biden has a unique opportunity to rebuild our country morally, psychologically, and physically following the disastrous reign of President Donald Trump. The election of two Georgia Democratic Senators means that Democrats narrowly control both houses of Congress. And Biden might even win some Republican support in Congress for his economic plan, which includes $1.3 trillion in infrastructure and clean-energy investment. Many red states and Congressional districts have been among the hardest hit by the pandemic, business closures, and job loss.
When Trump was inaugurated in 2016, he touted his “trillion-dollar” commitment to rebuilding our transportation and energy infrastructure. Shortly after his election, he ostentatiously brought together heads of several building trades unions in the White House and told them that he was committed to a strong federal role in repairing our aging bridges, roads, schools, and airports.
At the time, Trump strategist Stephen K. Bannon insisted that Trump’s infrastructure program would be “as exciting as the 1930s,” referring to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s massive New Deal public works programs designed to put people back to work. It turned out that Trump’s “commitment” to infrastructure job creation was all tweet and no action.
Displaying Trump’s characteristic inattention to detail and lack of follow up, these bold pronouncements about infrastructure investments morphed into a trick bag of tax incentives designed to get corporations to invest in “Public-Private Partnerships”—referred to as P-3s.
P-3s work like this: In return for a dedicated income stream like tolls, private-investor funds provide the capital for infrastructure projects, thereby reducing the government’s need to borrow money. That sounds good on paper, but it doesn’t work unless corporations or private-investment firms can make profits on fixing bridges, repairing sewers, or building schools. Typically they can’t, which is why these tasks are normally done by the government, which is responsible for meeting public needs.
Trump’s early populist promises appealed to blue-collar workers who would be employed in fixing our infrastructure. But cutting taxes for the wealthy, repealing Obamacare, and increasing immigration restrictions took precedence over building schools and enhancing our ports and bridges. Even his plot to build a wall between the United States and Mexico, which he misleadingly described as an “infrastructure” project, turned out to be another fantasy.
According to Eric Dean, general president of the Iron Workers Union, which endorsed Biden, the union presented Trump with a long list of potential infrastructure projects early in his presidency. Trump, however, showed little interest in pursuing them.
“The building trades [unions] met with all of the major private investors and we had projects that were ready to go and they [the Trump Administration] did nothing with it,” Dean says. “I attended infrastructure rallies at Trump’s request, but eventually concluded that Trump’s approach was rhetoric, not reality.”
Democratic leaders Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer should use their majority margins in Congress to move quickly to pass a bold infrastructure bill.
One of the political advantages of going bold on infrastructure is the sheer necessity of doing so. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), which issues a regular “Report Card” on the state of our roads, bridges, schools, ports, and water and energy systems, the United States infrastructure gets a D-plus—well below where we should be to sustain a healthy and safe economy. They propose a ten-year investment plan of $2 trillion to raise our infrastructure to an adequate level.
Additionally, both red and blue states have critical infrastructure needs. With their control of the Senate, the Democrats don’t need Republican support to bring forward legislation for a vote. Even Senator Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican, has stated that “America desperately needs to invest in our infrastructure,” recognizing the deplorable condition of his own state’s coastline, which is increasingly threatened by the rising sea levels.
The last time the federal motor-fuel tax was raised, a major source of infrastructure funding, Bill Clinton was President. Adept political maneuvering, one of the essential but underappreciated “skills” of politics, will be essential for Pelosi and Schumer to advance an infrastructure agenda with adequate funding.
Biden needs to make sure that racial equity will be a cornerstone of any public sector investment. The building and construction trades unions have made dramatic progress in recent years in bringing people of color into their unions. These are jobs that provide a path to the middle class.
Iron Workers Union President Dean, who supports increased diversity in construction unions, acknowledges that the building trades unions were justifiably criticized in the past for not doing enough on racial equity.
“It’s a reputation we probably earned twenty to thirty years ago but we don’t deserve it today,” Dean says. “We are not our grandfather’s union.”
Biden’s pick for Secretary of Labor, Boston Mayor Marty Walsh, was formerly the head of the Greater Boston Building Trades unions, which he led into the twenty-first century in terms of gender and racial diversity and coalition-building with community and civil-rights groups.
During the New Deal period of the 1930s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt responded to the crisis of the Great Depression with major public sector building programs that put millions of people to work. Biden must communicate his public-spending proposals in a way that similarly inspires Americans.
In his first “fireside chat” in 1933, FDR kept his message simple: “I want to tell you what has been done in the last few days, and why it was done, and what the next steps are going to be.”
President Biden has said his approach will be to “tell it straight.” He should ground his vision and rhetoric within the U.S. pragmatic tradition, with its emphasis on experimentation and flexibility. He will need discipline that he has not always shown, but he should communicate in ways that regular people can understand. He needs to point out that rebuilding our deteriorating infrastructure will be a national project that knits our country together economically, socially, and also in terms of public health.
Rightwing activists and pundits will label much of what Biden proposes as “socialist,” ignoring the fact that government spending on infrastructure or basic research has always expanded opportunities for the private sector. Private contractors often repair our streets, bridges, schools, and sewers—with government funding.
After the destruction in Washington, D.C., incited by the soon-to-be-former President, it’s time to rebuild. If Biden is politically adroit, bold, and gets some lucky breaks, and if there is an activist movement ready to push him beyond the narrow ground of conventional politics, we have a fighting chance to succeed.