The ambitious infrastructure plan presented by President Joe Biden last Wednesday goes far beyond building bridges and roads: it includes funds to generate clean energy, connect the entire country to high-speed Internet and offer more support to caregivers. of older adults and children.
The total amount proposed is
$ 2.3 trillion
.
The
American Jobs Plan would
allocate $ 400 billion for seniors and people with disabilities through Medicaid.
With these funds,
caregivers
could be
paid to visit people in need in their homes
, so that many of them would no longer need to live permanently in nursing homes or other long-term facilities.
"It's a change in the perception of what infrastructure means," Mary Kay Henry, international president of the International Union of Service Workers, told Yahoo News.
[This is how Biden proposes raising taxes to pay for his new stimulus plan focused on infrastructure]
For Henry, the coronavirus pandemic has highlighted the importance of essential workers for the functioning of the economy, including people who are dedicated to caring for others.
Although the Administration has left many of the details of the plan to Congress, one of the goals it has set is to
increase the salaries of people who provide care services
.
Most of these people are minority women, particularly undocumented immigrants who tend to receive lower wages.
"For a long time, caregivers, who are mostly women of color and immigrants, have been invisible, undervalued and underpaid," Biden said Wednesday during the speech in Pittsburgh when presenting his plan.
[Biden's new stimulus plan will not raise taxes on you. But this is what you need to know]
Taking care of people is one of the sectors of the economy that has grown the most in recent decades.
In Pittsburgh, an industrial city in transition, jobs in technology and health have provided a
new source of jobs for thousands of people
who lost their jobs in the steel industry to international competition.
In addition to funding for those who care for the elderly and children, Biden has proposed revamping power grids, building bridges and roads, and investing in renewable energy and broadband internet in rural areas.
This
eight-year plan
, which would be paid for with an increase in corporate taxes over the next 15 years, is so comprehensive that it has been compared to Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, launched in the 1930s or the Great Society of Lyndon Johnson, in the 1960s.
Bring broadband Internet to every corner of the country
During the pandemic, Internet telecommuting became a necessity for countless companies and their employees.
Schools also relied on this technology to continue operating remotely.
But
at least 30 million people in rural areas of the country do not have access to high-speed Internet,
and there are millions more who cannot afford it.
Biden has proposed to allocate about $ 100 billion to extend the fiber optic network that carries broadband Internet to rural communities.
In a reference to the Rural Electrification Act in the 1930s, after the Great Depression, Biden called the Internet "
the new electricity,"
which has become necessary for all Americans.
The proposal seeks to lower the price of the Internet by encouraging competition and building networks that are owned by local governments, cooperatives and non-profit organizations.
Although it does not offer further details on how this would be achieved.
The Suez Canal recovers its usual rhythm of navigation
April 3, 202100: 25
The federal government already spent more than $ 47 billion between 2007 and 2017 trying to bring broadband internet to the most remote communities, according to a government report.
For some experts, America's rural Internet policy has been a mistake.
"A lot of what we have is very slow
,"
Gigi Sohn, a Federal Communications Commission official in the Obama Administration
, told
The Associated Press
.
[The Government extends the ban on evictions for non-payment of rent until June 30]
The White House has now said it wants "future-proof" networks in "underserved and underserved areas," so it doesn't have to rebuild them years later because they are out of date.
It's also unclear exactly what that means in terms of what kind of network will need to be built and where.
Many Republicans are opposed to funding Internet projects in places that already have a network, even if it is very slow, something they call "overbuilding."
Does Biden's infrastructure plan have a future in Congress?
Investing in infrastructure is a unique opportunity for Biden to succeed on an issue where his two predecessors, Barack Obama and Donald Trump, made big promises that never materialized.
However, the proposal
has already faced criticism from both the right and the left
, at a time when Democrats have a slim margin in the House of Representatives and an even narrower one in the Senate, where they are divided 50 to 50 with the vote of the vice president, Kamala Harris, for the tiebreaker.
Republicans are concerned about the size and breadth of the plan and have spoken out against raising taxes on corporations.
US commodity prices skyrocket due to the economic impact of the pandemic
April 1, 202100: 21
"When people think of infrastructure, they think of roads, bridges, ports and airports. That is a very small part of what they have presented as an infrastructure package," Blunt said on ABC.
"The other 70% of the package, more or less, does not have much to do with infrastructure," he added.
Some moderate Democrats have also expressed
concern about the high price of the plan and the associated increase in taxes and public debt
, while for other Democrats on the progressive wing the package would not be enough.
[A four-day workweek? These businesses in Spain do the experiment]
“The president has made us a serious proposal.
Much more work needs to be done in that regard, "Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders said on CNN.
"We are behind many other countries around the world in providing services for working families, the elderly and children," he added.
Representative Ritchie Torres, a Democrat from New York, told CBS that the funds for public housing should be doubled.
The president would need
the support of all the Democrats in the Senate and at least 10 Republicans to pass the law
, unless they used a special procedure known as budget reconciliation where they could pass it with a simple majority, something they have not ruled out. carry out.
With information from Yahoo News, The Associated Press and The Wall Street Journal.