INFRASTRUCTURE
Trump versus Biden
on Infrastructure
A tale of rhetorical tape
By Matthew McMullan, Alliance for American Manufacturing
Infrastructure is a huge part of our country’s shared experience.
When you hear a politician talking about infrastructure
investment, it means spending to repair the roads we all drive
on, the trains we take to work and the airports from which we
travel. It also means laying cable so there can be reliable internet
access in rural areas, upgrading drinking water systems so cities
like Flint aren’t made to drink poison indefinitely and building
resiliency into our aging (and stressed) electric grid. It’s quite literally
all around us, and it’s been decaying for a long time.
This is not a new issue. People have been agitating for a large
infrastructure spending program to no avail for so long that it’s
become something of a joke. But that doesn’t make getting it done
any less of a worthwhile struggle. A gargantuan federal spending
bill for infrastructure projects would improve our national economic
efficiency, make the rails, roads and bridges we all use safer,
spread a ton of money around and put literally millions of people
to work – no small thing when the coronavirus-induced recession
has pushed unemployment toward 10%.
But enough preamble – we all know this stuff is important.
Where do the two candidates stand?
Because President Trump is the incumbent, we’ll start with a
look at Joe Biden.
So what has Biden done?
Before he was vice president for eight years, Joe Biden had an
almost 40-year career in the Senate. He commuted via Amtrak
from his home in Delaware to the U.S. Capitol that entire time; as
such, he’s been a reliable advocate for rail infrastructure funding.
He’s been talking about this stuff forever – because he’s been in
Washington forever.
But it’s probably more helpful to look at what he’s done recently.
When he became vice president during the Obama administration,
Biden was essentially handed responsibility for the implementation
of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) – the
2009 federal relief package passed in the wake of the financial crisis
– which included large pots of money for infrastructure projects.
The ARRA got almost no support from congressional Republicans,
who shockingly didn’t see the efficacy in passing a stimulus bill
written by Democrats, but some conservative opponents from that
time concede the program didn’t lack for oversight – which was
Biden’s job. He spent a lot of time calling local and regional officials
to make sure the money was spent correctly and the program
worked as planned.
What’s Biden proposing now?
In November of last year, the Biden campaign released an initial
$1.3 trillion infrastructure proposal. This summer, he upped
the proposal’s numbers to $2 trillion. It would, as the Wall Street
Journal described it, “use climate policy as an economic development
tool over a framework of four years.”
This climate policy-infused infrastructure package Biden is
proposing, he says, would eliminate carbon emissions from the
national power grid by 2035 and greatly expand the availability
and use of electric vehicles and electric mass transit – all of which
would create markets for new infrastructure spending. It would
also include hundreds of billions of dollars to repair existing roads,
bridges and other infrastructure. The clean energy infrastructure
push is a major part of his larger proposed economic agenda,
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This article was originally published by the Alliance for American Manufacturing on its blog and is printed here with permission. This article
is published for informational purposes only and may not represent the views of the Pile Driving Contractors Association, its members or
Lester Publications, LLC.
A federal spending bill for infrastructure projects would improve
America’s economy and make rails, roads and bridges safer
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