Joe Biden gave his first address to the American people last night in an appearance before a joint session of Congress and as expected, he used his time in the limelight to push for trillions of dollars in new spending on things like infrastructure. But despite Biden’s spendathon, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) think he should spend hundreds of billions of dollars more on what they are calling the “Green New Deal For Public Housing Act.”
Biden pushed his $1.8 trillion plan to boost programs for families, students and children (American Families Plan), and he pushed his $2.3 trillion jobs and infrastructure plan (American Jobs Plan). He called the American Jobs Plan a “blue-collar blueprint to build America” that “recognizes something I’ve always said: Wall Street didn’t build this country. The middle class built this country. And unions built the middle class.”
Class warfare and pro-union hype aside, Biden’s infrastructure proposal spends a lot of money on a several far-left agenda items while spending very little on actual infrastructure. Here’s a brief breakdown:
- $650 billion for roads, rail, and transportation
- $650 billion for “home infrastructure” (broadband, clean water, the electric grid, and high-quality housing)
- $400 billion for the “care economy” (to create “well-paying caregiving jobs with benefits)
- $580 billion for manufacturing, training, and research (to pay for jobs lost due to his global warming policies)
And the icing on the cake? Biden promises to pay for this over a 15-year period by raising taxes on corporations, which eventually means higher prices for consumers, lost jobs, and business closures.
Biden’s proposal should send tingles up the legs of every Democratic Socialists, Marxists, Communists, etc. in Washington, but Sanders and AOC apparently don’t think that he’s earmarked enough money for the “home infrastructure” portion of his proposal because it doesn’t do enough to address so-called climate change.
To address Biden’s apparent oversight of their far-left priorities, Bernie Sanders and AOC introduced the “Green New Deal for Public Housing Act” last week to provide $172 billion or more to retrofit existing public housing — a bill originally introduced by Sanders in 2019 and co-sponsored by Sens. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA).
In addition to so-called climate change concerns, the bill also addresses other facets of the far-left agenda. Here are some of the details as reported by TheHill.com:
The legislation would create two new grant programs to achieve carbon neutrality in U.S. public housing through workforce development and construction.
It would provide grants to retrofit all 950,000 of the country’s public housing units and upgrade building electrification and water quality, according to a fact sheet released by the legislators’ offices. It would also repeal the Faircloth Amendment, which restricts the building of new public housing developments.
Public housing agencies seeking to qualify for the grants would be required to guarantee collective bargaining for workers on the projects, as well as classifying them as employees rather than independent contractors. It would also guarantee a right to return for any tenants displaced during construction and fully fund tenant protection vouchers. The bill’s authors project it would create up to 240,000 jobs annually and achieve carbon emission reductions of about 5.6 million metric tons.
In a statement, Ocasio-Cortez called the bill’s provisions essential to building on the $2 trillion infrastructure plan unveiled by the White House earlier this month.
“With America facing an affordable housing crisis and the perils of climate change, we must invest in our housing infrastructure now. We also must be honest about the scale of the problem,” she said in a statement.
“Just to address the backlog of critical maintenance repairs in [the New York City Housing Authority] and nowhere else — chipping lead paint, broken heating systems, failing gas utilities — would require $40M, what is currently in the American Jobs Plan. This bill would invest up to $172 billion over ten years, improving the lives of nearly 2 million individuals and securing the long term future of the nation’s public housing stock,” she said.
As you might expect, Bernie Sanders and AOC are being embraced by far-left special-interest groups who consider the Green New Deal for Public Housing Act a first step to greater things.
“The Green New Deal for Public Housing Act is a tremendous opportunity to ensure everyone has a safe, affordable place to call home, and advances us towards a new era, where the government invests in good, union jobs empowering people to revitalize their own communities –all while combating the climate crisis,” Varshini Prakash, executive director of Sunrise Movement, said in a statement about the bill.
This kind of optimism isn’t in vain because the Sanders/AOC proposal is considered a vital part of a new effort to pass the Green New Deal originally introduced in 2019 by AOC when she first arrived in Washington — a law that would essentially turn America into a command economy owned and operated by the government.
The day after AOC and Bernie Sanders made their proposal, she was joined by Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) — her partner in crime in 2019 — to revive the Green New Deal. Speaking to the press, Markey stated that while Biden’s American Jobs Act included the “DNA of the Green New Deal,” he promised to push Biden to expand the package.
“The Biden administration is including climate action, environmental justice and the care economy in its recovery plan.
”For the past two years, it has been proven that the Green New Deal isn’t just a resolution — it is a revolution.
”Do we want to go beyond even what Joe Biden has proposed? The answer is ‘yes.’ We believe that this is the moment that requires us to act big, think big, have a program that matches the magnitude of the problem that we’re confronted with. And to do so with justice.”
Biden’s spending spree on so-called infrastructure is bad enough on its own, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) want to make it worse by spending hundreds of billions of dollars more on the “Green New Deal For Public Housing Act.”
I would say to hang on to your wallets, but by the time Biden, the Democrats, and even the Republicans are through with things, you won’t have anything in it to protect.
David Leach is the owner of the Strident Conservative. He holds people of every political stripe accountable for their failure to uphold conservative values, and he promotes those values instead of political parties.
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