Top Biden officials busted telling an enormous lie about 'infrastructure' plan
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
The first dishonest aspect of President Joe Biden's latest massive multitrillion spending proposal was its claim to be an "infrastructure" plan. In reality, less than half of the spending goes to transportation infrastructure. Much of the rest goes to waste and unrelated partisan spending.
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But the misleading narrative didn't stop there: Top Biden officials repeatedly pushed an objectively false statistic about the number of jobs their plan will create. "The American Jobs Plan is about a generational investment [and is] going to create 19 million jobs," Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said on Meet the Press. "It would create 19 million jobs," White House National Economic Council Director Brian Deese claimed on Fox News Sunday. The liberal Center for American Progress similarly asserted that the Biden plan would "help create 19 million jobs."
Wow! A whopping 19 million jobs created! Who could oppose that!?
There's just one problem: This 19 million figure is based on a gross distortion of an economic report. The claim that Biden's spending bonanza would create 19 million jobs has no basis in reality. The figure comes from Moody's Analytics, a respected economic analysis firm, albeit one often very generous and favorable to big government spending plans. However, what the Moody's report does is map out projections for several different scenarios.
In the scenario where Biden's infrastructure proposal is passed, Moody's projects that the economy will create 18.96 million jobs over a decade. Yet as Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler aptly explained, that's compared to a baseline projection of 16.3 million jobs being created without the infrastructure proposal. (But with the already-passed stimulus legislation). So the real number of jobs Biden's plan would create, according to this Moody's report, is 2.7 million. That's a far cry from the "19 million jobs created" in Biden's initial telling. Indeed, the White House and Buttigieg have had to retract their objectively false claim publicly.
Oops.
This raises the question: Why did the Biden administration have to twist the facts to defend its $2.25 trillion plan? Well, maybe because the real estimate of just 2.7 million jobs is incredibly damning — that comes out to roughly $833,333 in taxpayer dollars spent per job created. Suffice it to say that's not the best return on investment.
To be clear, this is all ignoring the actual costs of Biden's "infrastructure" plan. The spending from it only "creates" millions of jobs if you just look at the impact of the spending. But if you look at the costs and trade-offs, too, as any serious policy analyst must, then it's not clear this multitrillion investment would, on net, create any jobs at all. For example, we must weigh the jobs "created" by the spending — you know, at a mere $833,333 per gig — against the hundreds of thousands of other jobs eliminated by the accompanying corporate tax hike.
Meanwhile, even the benefits are not so straightforward as tallying up the jobs created.
The government cannot create resources out of thin air. Any dollar it spends on "infrastructure" must ultimately be extracted from somewhere else in the economy, either directly through taxation or indirectly through increasing government debt or inflation caused by money-printing. Every dollar spent on this "infrastructure" plan is a dollar not invested or spent elsewhere. If this plan is passed, millions of unseen future jobs will never come into existence as a result.
The true economic prospects of Biden's multitrillion spending plan are nothing short of abysmal. It's no wonder administration officials had to lie to make their case!
Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is a Washington Examiner contributor and host of the Breaking Boundaries podcast.
Tags:Opinion, Beltway Confidential, Blog Contributors, Infrastructure, Joe Biden
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19 MILLION jobs!
Fantastic!
I wonder if they are shovel-ready jobs like one of his predecessor's were?
Yes, they are. You always need a shovel when politicians are telling you something.
We'll call it "The big Whopper!"
I thought it was "Biden living in his own reality".
Much like the media ignored, or explained away all of his other lies and exaggerations.
They do protect him, don't they?