The Biden "Jobs Plan" contains some good infrastructure proposals, but most of the spending will not reduce carbon emissions. Only two million buildings are targeted for retrofitting and there are no serious regulations to force investment into sustainable energy. Robert Pollin joins Paul Jay on theAnalysis.news Transcript Paul Jay Hi, I'm Paul Jay. Welcome to theAnalysis.news. Please don't forget the donate button at the top of the webpage and on YouTube there's a subscribe button in the corner and a share button too. Be back in a second. In the statement that announced the American jobs plan, that's the Biden administration's infrastructure plan, it says, "While the American Rescue Plan is changing the course of the pandemic and delivering relief for working families, this is no time to build back the way things were. This is the moment to reimagine and rebuild a new economy". So does this plan do it? The amount of the investment that's been announced is roughly $2.25 trillion dollars, and while it's far from clear what the final bill will actually look like at first, look, it does seem at least a more serious plan in the direction of addressing the climate crisis, but given the scope and urgency of the crisis, is it enough? And is the way the money is being targeted going to be effective? We're going to look at the plan, not so much just about the politics, about whether it might pass or not, which is what most of the media is talking about. In other words, if this plan is the plan that becomes law, will it address the urgency and scale of what's facing us? Now joining us to unpack the Biden plan is Robert Pollin. He's the co-founder of PERI the Political Economy Research Institute in Amherst, Massachusetts. He's the coauthor of a book with Noam Chomsky titled Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet. Thanks for joining me, Bob. Bob Pollin Very glad to be on.Thank you, Paul. Paul Jay Let me just just add to my intro just one note and you might comment on this a bit and then we'll get into the plan. It's a rather unique moment for such a big infrastructure plan because of the pandemic, because of the recession and the danger of an even deepening economic crisis. Wall Street on the whole, doesn't seem to be adverse to a big infrastructure plan. Of course, lots of the banks own lots of companies that will make money out of such a plan. But still the normal way they are adverse to deficits and yelling about the problems of inflation. We're hearing very little of that from the banks, and we're not even hearing that much pushback to what Biden plans to do in terms of raising taxes to pay for some of this. So maybe you can just comment on this kind of moment we're in and then we'll get into more of the details of the plan. Bob Pollin I agree. It's a historically unique moment. I mean, the Covid recession in terms of its severity over the last year was actually greater than even the 1930s depression. Of course, the 1930s depression lasted for a decade. This one is so far about a year. Half the people in the country, in the U.S. experienced layoffs, unprecedented and the levels of poverty increased. Obviously, people dying from covid, it's really just been a severe crisis. Now, the point is that with universal vaccination or near universal vaccination, maybe we can come out of it, but we've already had massive numbers of business closings and so just to say we're going to go back to where we were is impossible on the face of it because the composition of the economy has changed because of ...
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