CNBC’s Joe Kernen is unimpressed by the Biden administration’s American Jobs Plan.
Specifically, the CNBC anchor did a fine job this week forcing Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg to defend the idea that everything included in the president’s monstrous $2.3 trillion proposal is “infrastructure.”
This isn’t a disingenuous reading of the issue. Democrats really are classifying all the unrelated items included in the American Jobs Plan as “infrastructure.”
“Paid leave is infrastructure,” said Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York. “Child care is infrastructure. Caregiving is infrastructure.”
President Joe Biden said recently, “The idea of infrastructure has always evolved to meet the aspirations of the American people and their needs. And it is evolving again today.”
Buttigieg himself said recently that all the left-wing goodies jammed in the American Jobs Plan count as “infrastructure” because “infrastructure is the foundation that allows us to go about our lives. … To me, it makes no sense to say, ‘I would have been for broadband, but I’m against it because it’s not a bridge. I would have been for eldercare, but I’m against it because it’s not a highway.'”
“We’re proposing a usage for the term ‘infrastructure’ that Republicans would say includes every wish list from the Democratic Party going back 50 years,” Kernen said during an interview with Buttigieg.
The host then asked why the president’s plan doesn’t simply target those things related specifically to the literal definition of infrastructure, “roads, bridges, airports — throw in, you know, some internet and Wi-Fi,” with a realistic funding request, rather than inflate the full cost of the proposal with a host of unrelated items.
Buttigieg had no clear answer, offering instead that “infrastructure” includes “the broader forms of infrastructure we’re talking about. They’re all part of the foundation that make it possible for us to live well.”
“Come on, Mr. Secretary,” said Kernen, “you might, you might as well just tell me, ‘You know, you need those roads to drive to free college and free childcare, and therefore, I want to build them so that’ — I mean, come on.”
The host added, “You can’t do all of it at once.”
Buttigieg flailed again and offered up a weird corporate-sounding word salad. “You can either organize your thinking around the org chart of the federal government, or you can organize it around what the lives of human beings in this country are actually like,” Buttigieg said.
“Then you could make that jump to everything under the sun as infrastructure,” Kernen shot back, “and we should spend $100 trillion and give everything to everyone because that’s what their life is. You can’t do — we don’t have the money. We don’t have the wherewithal.”
The transportation secretary disagreed.
“We do have the money though, that’s the thing!” said Buttigieg. “Like, we abundantly do have the money — because, because — the bill is paid for, right? And the real question is, ‘Can we afford not to do this?’”
For the record, the public debt held by the United States reached a milestone this year, surpassing $28 trillion for the first time.
Kernen responded to Buttigieg’s remarks with a simple: “Wow.”
Wow indeed.
