Biden's American Jobs Plan Is Devoid of Moral Values and Economic Realities

By Jonathan Verlin

The American Jobs Plan is premised chiefly upon investing $621 billion in America's crumbling transportation infrastructure. The Biden administration claims, "Decades of declining public investment has left our roads, bridges, rail, and transit systems in poor condition, with a trillion-dollar backlog of needed repairs. More than 35,000 people die in traffic crashes on U.S. roads each year, and millions more are seriously and often permanently injured." These statistics related to infrastructure are misleading. While traffic deaths have risen appreciably from 2020 despite fewer people driving, the preponderance were caused by aberrant behavior, not infrastructure. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration statistics show that deaths resulting from impaired driving rose more than 9% since 2019, and failure to wear safety belts increased 15%. There can be little doubt that the White House's distortion of the causes of death is based on ulterior motives.

It is more likely that the vast investment in infrastructure is driven by the desire of progressives to consolidate economic and political power. It can scarcely be called legitimate. The most damning evidence for this view is that specific places and people that such projects are intended to help are strikingly absent. Similarly, the costs for each of the (unnamed) projects are not supplied, nor are safeguards to control cost overruns included. In fact, the Plan is alarming for anyone who typically asks, Why? What? Where? When?

Another commentator has already noted a similar lack of specificity in Biden's so-called Fact Sheet on Domestic Terrorism. The so-called jobs "Plan" provides a lot of vacuous generalities that serve the purpose of dramatically expanding the federal government but vacuously ignore specifics.

Economically, there is no long-term financial plan to pay for improvements without both raising taxes across the board and further increasing the already burgeoning national debt. Think of the fabulous expansion of railroads in the 19th century. The government did not pay for the expansion of the railroads but incentivized the railroads to invest in the project by providing land grants to the railroads for every mile of new track laid. They found a way for the government to support the private sector to accomplish infrastructure goals.

So many economic issues affecting the USA are ignored by this document. Honest hardworking people are becoming increasingly alarmed about the loss of our energy independence, acerbated by the shutdown of the Keystone XL pipeline, resulting in higher fuel prices and transportation costs of goods to market. More importantly, the shutdown led to the loss of thousands of jobs. The shift away from natural gas– and oil-generated power in favor of electric power for cars, and solar power and windmills for homes, will lead to tremendous employment dislocation. Yet these likely dislocations are not addressed in a meaningful way by the so-called Plan. As a Plan, it is therefore strangely disconnected from the stated goals of the administration.

The issue of job development cannot be properly addressed without seriously addressing inflation. Despite the attempts of Janet Yellen to downplay the threat of inflation even as our national debt surges to unprecedented levels under the Democrat give-away-the-store public spending, this elephant in the room is not addressed in the Jobs Plan even in passing. The consumer price index has already risen 1.4% in the past year. Earnings have begun to stagnate while taxes reflexively will escalate to meet the rising demand for increased social services, which the administration is ready to offer to non-citizens as well as citizens. These are portents of trouble.

When the many key issues of economics are not properly addressed by a document that is more propaganda and posturing than truly analytical and issue-oriented, many bad consequences are sure to follow. Why? The answer is simple: the fiscal and philosophical fundamentals have not changed. The virulent evil of China's communist dictatorship and its footprint in our national economy must be reckoned with. We must avoid becoming a command economy like China, but compete under free-market strategies, meanwhile shrinking our reliance on government. If we are to survive, we must shrink, not increase, our dependence on a government-driven and controlled economy. If America is still to be the dominant economic powerhouse, our strategy must change. So must our priorities.

The moral dimension of jobs and work requires that we determine our own future through the classical dignities of work and self-reliance. How ironic that we citizens are offered an American Jobs Plan while thousands of illegal so-called refugees are being admitted who will undermine our economy. They will take jobs away from actual citizens, and they will depend upon social services that will drain and undermine the economic life of citizens through excessive taxation and a skyrocketing national debt. The American Jobs Plan is for Americans, yet without borders, there is no country. We control who comes here and how. This does not make us racist, narrow-minded, or xenophobic. It is the rule of law, which makes us American.

We cannot endure as a country by leveraging large amounts of long-term debt and cultivating an inflationary economy. American life is and should always be a renewal movement built upon the dignity of being an American — a living hope directed by discipline, virtue, and above all order. Therefore, it takes time, energy, and courage. Most of all, it requires character and a manifestation of moral truth to set an example. We do not need the stream of ideological pap and "green" thinking that has been emanating from the Democrats. We do not need a jobs plan that has no plans. Moral realities combined with non-green economic realities must be embraced and put forward as an alternative to the bogus jobs plan of this administration.