President Biden’s American Jobs Plan would recover the jobs lost to the pandemic by early 2023. Naturally, Republicans don’t like it.
“This is the missed opportunity of a lifetime. Instead of rebuilding our economy, the majority would stunt our economic growth, destroy jobs, threaten our long-term stability with the Green New Deal, provide union bailouts, and force the largest tax hike in American history, leaving working-class Americans to foot the bill,” First District Republican Rob Wittman said in a statement on the president’s jobs proposal, which invests $1.3 trillion in community and transportation infrastructure, $580 billion into research and development, workforce development and manufacturing, and $400 billion to support home and community-based care for the elderly and disabled.
Yeah, god-awful, wasteful, socialist stuff, all that.
You have to wonder who worked up the GOP talking points here.
OK, sure, the last time the Republicans wrecked the economy and created an environment in which the electorate wanted a Democrat to come in and fix it, the GOP strategy was to state publicly that they didn’t want to see the Democrat, in that case, Barack Obama, succeed, because ‘Murica, own the libs, the rest.
And then there’s real life.
The U.S. economy lost more than 8 million jobs in 2020. That rivals the 8.8 million jobs lost during the 2007-2009 Great Recession, and note, that was over parts of three years.
The 2020 pandemic recession, furthered by Donald Trump dithering over what to do to combat COVID-19, undid all the efforts over the course of a decade to rebuild from the 2007-2009 recession.
The talking point about “the largest tax hike in American history,” echoing Republican nonsense language dating back to Newt Gingrich, would have you believe that the entirety of the Trump single term wasn’t about redistributing wealth through changes to the tax code to elites.
It’s to remind you that Democrats are the “tax and spend” party, and distract you from the fact that Republicans are the “cut taxes and spend more” party.
What gets Republicans in a lather isn’t that money is being spent; it’s that it’s not being spent to the benefit of their benefactors who make their money the old way – fossil fuels, exploiting cheap labor, gambling with money on high-finance rolls of the dice knowing that they won’t lose because they’ve already been deemed too big to fail.
“Green New Deal-style projects have no place in an infrastructure package. Nor does repealing right to work laws. As with the majority’s previous, so-called COVID-19 relief package, this infrastructure bill is just another trojan horse for progressive political priorities,” Wittman said.
And the GOP talking points here are just another trojan horse for regressive political priorities.
There. Fixed that for you.
Story by Chris Graham
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