Creative Commons
It’s time for the United States to go back to the future—a future of true greatness created by a people united in building a strong nation for the common good.
While the President’s plan is not as big as it needs to be, neither is it merely more tinkering around the edges.
Throughout our history, we’ve had leaders who dared to do big public projects: Lincoln’s fight for a transcontinental railroad and a land-grant college network; Teddy Roosevelt’s establishment of our national park system; FDR’s electrification of rural areas, creation of social safety nets, and conservation initiatives; Eisenhower’s interstate highway system; Truman’s GI Bill; John Kennedy’s moonshot; and Lyndon Johnson’s anti-poverty and civil rights achievements.
It’s only during the last forty years, since Ronald Reagan’s “government-is-evil” demagoguery, that our Presidents and lawmakers—Democrats as well as Republicans—have shriveled to no-can-do mediocrities, unwilling even to try tackling the nation’s big needs.
But—surprise!—here comes Joe Biden, a lifelong go-slow Democrat, unexpectedly rising to the challenge by proposing a get-serious, roll-up-our-sleeves, $2 trillion package of investments to modernize and extend the United States’ collapsing infrastructure.
While the President’s plan is not as big as it needs to be, neither is it merely more tinkering around the edges, meekly asking the corporate plutocracy to put another coat of paint on our country’s structural inadequacies.
Biden’s proposal not only repairs roads, bridges, and dams, but also gives a long overdue boost to such needs as rural high-speed broadband Internet, replacing the country’s deadly networks of lead water pipes, building clean energy systems, constructing affordable housing, upgrading public transit systems, increasing home health care for the elderly, and providing affordable child care facilities.
Even more transformative than the particular components is Biden’s back-to-the-future method of paying for his Rebuild America agenda, by returning to progressive taxation. Instead of the same old no-tax, laissez-fairyland extremism that Washington has practiced for forty years (leading to the deep infrastructure hole we’re now in), Biden will at long last demand that multinational corporate behemoths and their greed-fueled uber-rich chieftains stop dodging their tax obligations to the United States.
It’s the same fair-taxation policy that funded our interstate highway system and the Space Race—a period of unmatched U.S. productivity and rising living standards for millions of working families.
An old political truism expresses that often-frustrating challenge of making big change: “Where there’s a will, there are 1,000 won’ts.”
And, oh, what a hurricane of won’ts are swirling out of Washington’s power centers to pummel Joe Biden! Corporate lobbyists and their Congressional hirelings are howling at his plan to pay for his infrastructure upgrades. Biden wants to raise the corporate tax rate to 28 percent from its present level of 21 percent. Mitch McConnell, the GOP’s Senate leader, practically blew a gasket wailing that poor corporate America should not be forced to bear this burden.
But wait—didn’t Mitch single out the corporate giants in 2017 to receive a windfall in their tax rate, lowering it from 35 percent? Yes, and they pocketed hundreds of billions of dollars from that giveaway. So nudging them up to 28 percent is hardly punishment, for they still come out way ahead of the rate that regular people pay.
And the corporate tax rate is a sham, for the giants have wormed loopholes in the law to give them exemptions so they can avoid paying what they owe. A new study reports that at least fifty-five of the biggest corporations paid a goose egg in U.S. income taxes last year—zero, nada—despite hauling in billions in profits.
As Senator Bernie Sanders, Independent of Vermont, tweeted: “If you paid $120 for a pair of [Nike] shoes, you paid more to Nike than it paid in federal income taxes over the past three years, while it made $4.1 billion in profits.”
That’s the corrupt wealth system that Mitch McConnell, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the corporate plutocracy are defending. As McConnell so gingerly put it, “As much as we would like to address infrastructure,” asking our corporate political funders to pay more “is not going to get support from our side.”
So, who do they want to pay for it? You. Working people and the poor. Republicans have called for a much smaller infrastructure package paid for with user fees and added taxes on consumers.
But that is not what the moment calls for. It calls for the United States to go big, for the good of all.