To Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, there’s always more than enough money.
The presumptive Democratic presidential candidate on Tuesday put forward a $2 trillion plan to save the global environment.
The plan “would attempt to eliminate carbon emissions from the power grid by 2035, put Americans into electric vehicles and zero-emission mass transit, and rebuild roads, bridges, and other infrastructure,” the Wall Street Journal reports. “The plan would devote spending to minority communities and bolster rules to support unions, which the Biden campaign frames as a way to ensure benefits go first to the poor and working-class people and to communities hurt the most by pollution.”
Biden is working to hard to bring Sanders’ supporters into his camp. They mostly stayed home last election after Hillary Clinton and leaders of the Democratic National Committee set up a nomination process heavily skewed to aid the former first lady and Secretary of State.
The former vice president is also taking several pages out of AOC’s book. The New York Democratic socialist last year put out a plan that some experts will cost $7 trillion over a decade, while others say it will cost $93 trillion. In February, a study said AOC’s Geen New Deal would cost the average household nearly $75,000 in the first year in key swing states, driving the U.S. economy into a “steep economic depression.”
Biden’s plan looks a lot like AOC’s, spending hundreds of billions to eliminate carbon-powered domestic travel and shift to an all-alternate energy power grid.
How to pay for it all? Biden’s campaign says his plan would be paid for “with a mix of tax increases on corporations and the wealthy and stimulus spending, likely related to the coronavirus pandemic. A campaign aide said if Mr. Biden is elected president he would work with Congress to expand stimulus spending that wouldn’t need to be offset by spending cuts,” The Journal said.
“These aren’t pie in the sky dreams. These are actionable policies that we can get to work on right away,” Biden said.
“We can live up to our responsibilities, meet the challenges of a world at risk of a climate catastrophe, build more climate resilient communities, put millions of skilled workers on the job, and make life markedly better and safer for the American people all at once and benefit the world in the process,” he added.
