Joe Biden for President
2 min readIn a very few years, our country is going to adopt a “Green New Deal,” and hopefully the rest of the world will follow our example.
The Green New Deal will turn our existing economy upside down. Trillions of dollars of existing power plants, and the gas and oil industries will be abandoned. Millions of high-paying jobs will disappear. hopefully to re-appear in the new solar, wind, electric car, and energy efficiency industries.
It will be the moral equivalent of war, and comparable to World War II’s vast reordering of the economy.
Within my lifetime, I’ve only seen one instance when the Federal government mobilized on such a vast scale. That was the $800 billion Stimulus Bill of 2009.
Beginning in 2007, the crooked bankers and stock swindlers had so completely undermined the US economy that a handful of speculators almost drove our nation bankrupt. The big banks, brokerages, and insurance companies teetered on a cascading failure. We were about to lose General Motors and tens of thousands of union jobs there and elsewhere.
Obama and Biden cobbled together a series of financial supports for these and other industries, and also appropriated, via Congress, billions of dollars to rebuild America in a thousand ways.
Then-President Obama appointed then-Vice President Joe Biden to oversee administration of the 2009 Stimulus.
The Stimulus mixed infrastructure improvement with economic stimuli, protected by federally-mandated wages, with vast sums earmarked for renewable energy. It paid for the largest solar powered energy plant in the world in California. It paid for carbon capture in Texas. It paid for tiny schoolhouses and courthouses and other public buildings, everywhere from rural Georgia to down town in the Bronx, to update their heating and air conditioning and install better insulation, and save energy from that day onward.
In other words, the 2009 Stimulus looked a lot like the Green New Deal.
Obama and Biden’s Stimulus rescued the economy from the maw of another Great Depression. It generated up to 10 million jobs. It supplemented unemployment payments. It saved us from economic disaster.
Biden gets some or all of the credit (or blame) for the Stimulus, since Obama publicly named him the point man for the Stimulus.
When I look over the rich field of Democratic Party candidates, I wonder which one would best administer the Green New Deal. I keep coming back to the guy that helped administered the last successful $900 billion expenditure on economic and environmental projects. That’s Joe Biden.
