President Joe Biden was introduced as the “transportation president” during a Monday afternoon stop in Kearny, New Jersey, that was designed to advance the “Build Back Better” plan and the reelection chances of the state’s Democratic governor.
“I’m a train guy,” Biden said standing before a backdrop of trains.
While touting America’s proud transportation history, he also outlined problems with the northeast region’s train infrastructure that he hopes to resolve through trillions of dollars of new spending.
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“For most of the 20th century, we led the world by a significant margin,” Biden said. “We invested in ourselves, we invested in our people. Not only in our roads, highways, and bridges but in our people, in our families.”
In recent decades the United States “took [its] eyes off the ball,” Biden continued, noting that the World Economic Forum now ranks U.S. infrastructure 13th in the world and that the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development ranked America 35th out of 37 countries for its investment in early childhood education.
The infrastructure and reconciliation bills weren’t the only reason for Biden’s trip to the Garden State. New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy is locked in a surprisingly tight reelection race against GOP challenger Jack Ciattarelli, and both Biden and his former boss Barack Obama are visiting the state in the race’s final stretch.
“I’ve resolved that we have to once again build up America from the bottom up and the middle out,” Biden said. “I’ve never seen a time in American history when the middle class did well that the wealthy didn’t do very well.”
Biden spoke at length about Kearny’s Portal Bridge, which opened in 1910 and has become a choke point in recent decades. The bridge opens 100 times a year and “something goes wrong” 15% of the time, causing 2,000 hours of delays between 2014 and 2018.
The infrastructure bill would replace the bridge with one that wouldn’t need to open and close for ships, creating what Biden called “8,000 union jobs” in the process.
“Union jobs. Union!” the president said leaning into the microphone. “Someone calculated that I used the word ‘union’ more than the last seven presidents combined. Because guess what? It’s a decent wage.”
Touting his favorite mode of transportation, Biden said trains can be up to 10 times more energy efficient than driving and promised the infrastructure bill would prepare New Jersey for extreme weather events in the future.
Without naming him, Biden also took a swipe at Donald Trump.
“We haven’t passed a transformative infrastructure bill for a decade, think about this,” Biden said. “How many times under the former guy did we have infrastructure week? Not a single thing happened. We need to get this done.”
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The speech finished out with Biden touting universal pre-K and his child tax credit program, which he said would cut child poverty in New Jersey by 36%, promising that none of it would add to the national debt.
“You hear these numbers, $3.5 trillion or $1.75 trillion — we pay for it all,” Biden said to applause. “It doesn’t increase the deficit one single cent. So let’s get to work.”
