The White House recently unveiled an ambitious infrastructure and jobs plan. With Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, there is a good chance that something will pass. Speaker Pelosi hopes for the bill to pass Congress by the August recess. Here is a breakdown of Biden’s plan.
- Transportation and Infrastructure, $621 billion
- Quality of Life at Home, $650 billion
- Caregivers for elderly and people with disabilities, $400 billion
- Research and Development, $300 billion
The transportation infrastructure includes funds to promote electric vehicles, trains and system resiliency to climate disasters. Quality of life components focus on homes, schools, underground water infrastructure and broadband expansion, which is long overdue for rural residents. The caregiver sections seek to expand Medicaid to benefit elderly and disabled residents, as well as to increase the pay of healthcare workers, who are disproportionately women of color earning about $12 per hour while they care for our beloved family members. Research and development funds are meant to complement the other components with exploration of science, technology, engineering, economics and sociology relevant to improving the other components. On the whole, according to the White House, much of the nearly $2 billion plan goes to disadvantaged communities who have been pummeled by racist infrastructure planning and Republican policies favoring investors.
To pay for it,
Biden wants to raise the corporate tax rate to 28% to pay for the plan – a percentage that the White House noted is still below what corporations paid before President Donald Trump's tax cuts in 2017. Biden also wants to increase the minimum tax on U.S. multinational corporations to 21%.
The tax overhaul, dubbed the Made in America Tax Plan, seeks to incentivize job creation and investment in the U.S., end profit-shifting to tax havens and ensure large corporations pay "their fair share," according to the White House.
On the whole, the plan proposes big steps in the right direction. For example, it will accelerate adoption of electric vehicles. So, of course, Republicans are belittling it with simplistic framing about tax hikes and how this is a Green New Deal Trojan horse for a socialist takeover of god’s favorite country. They are saying that climate actions are not infrastructure, even though we have to build an infrastructure to mitigate the effects of climate change.
Progressives, meanwhile, point out that this plan is no GND, but only a step that falls far short of what we need to do to reverse centuries of increasing C emissions and decades of supply side disregard for government investment in infrastructure.
Notably, this plan, like most economic plans in the United States fails to put development in the context of circular economics. In the event of Congress actually passing an infrastructure plan, incorporating established circular economic principles will help to prevent generating excessive waste to be dumped on future generations.
The above screen shot from a recently cleared investment property is not transportation infrastructure, but it is included to illustrate that not prioritizing a circular economy will lead to unnecessary waste. It takes effort and investment to recycle and reuse the remains of projects. If you don’t pay to sort through it now, future generations will be forced to pay to clean it.
It’s not that hard to think about. Apply reduce, reuse and recycle on a national scale, and pay for it.
Europe has given us a circular economy foundation to build upon.
Yet, the Biden plan is thin on dealing with waste.
The National Waste & Recycling Association (NWRA) also expressed disappointment in a lack of recycling-specific points in the plan. “Biden’s proposal fails to take into account the need for increased domestic recycling infrastructure that was highlighted by shortages of manufacturing feedstock during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic last year,” the organization responded in a statement Thursday.
For its part, the Biden administration is saying that they are working towards national policies to address inadequacies in the historically decentralized waste management in the United States.
This issue gained renewed interest as the EPA began work on a national recycling strategy last year, including a goal to achieve a 50% recycling rate by 2030. Following that announcement, numerous groups commented they support the general ambition but need more detail on measurement plans, as well as potential funding or implementation support.
Measurement also came up in the Break Free From Plastic report, with calls to boost funding so the EPA could "develop and implement new data collection and reporting methodologies to accurately and transparently report waste reduction, recycling, and composting rates throughout the U.S." Various sources believe improving the existing system may be challenging given budgetary limitations at some state agencies, leading some to call for a broader rethink.
And, there are proposals to deal with the most obviously insidious of waste products, plastics.
The most ambitious bill that could come across Biden’s desk is the Break Free from Plastic Pollution Act, introduced earlier this year by Sen. Tom Udall (D-New Mexico) and Rep. Alan Lowenthal (D-California).
However, much of these plans are based in post-consumer actions. Industry must also be included in upstream measures. We can’t expect consumers to solve our waste issues unless industry is also regulated to take action on their resource usage, packaging, and pricing for effective waste management from production through consumption.
In summary, the Biden administration is taking steps to patch and improve infrastructure in the United States to utilize renewable energy, adapt for climate change, and distribute the benefits more equitably to historically underserved communities. While the plan falls well short of what we need for a clean, sustainable economy, Republicans will make it extraordinarily difficult to pass just what is included now. We need to keep information flowing and pressuring our representatives to overcome opposition and make the federal government take significant action.