Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich has blasted President Biden’s American Jobs Plan as “a tax increase bill masquerading as an infrastructure bill.”
The Biden plan “will not create jobs or ultimately improve our infrastructure,” Gingrich wrote Wednesday. “It will kill jobs and make infrastructure projects more expensive in time and money.”
Gingrich also notes a “deep irony” in Biden’s decision to start looking for support for his American Job Killing Tax Plan in Pittsburgh, the site of the central battlefield of the 1791 Whiskey Rebellion, in which Americans fought against an overreaching tax on whiskey imposed by the federal government.
Biden’s plan to raise all domestic corporate taxes by one-third, to set a minimum 21 percent tax rate for multinational U.S. corporations, and to raise taxes on oil and gas companies is a recipe for economic disaster, Gingrich observed.
Raising taxes does not create jobs, Gingrich added, pointing to the unemployment rate after passage of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Along with deep deregulation, the tax cuts led Americans to some of the lowest unemployment rates in modern U.S. history, especially among Black and Latino Americans.
“Only a true-believing leftwing Washington zealot could imagine a reality in which any of these measures will make America better or improve the lives of Americans,” he stated.
Gingrich is not alone in his criticism of the Biden plan.
Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell called the bill a “Trojan horse for far-left demands.”
“My advice to the administration: If you want to do an infrastructure bill, let’s do an infrastructure bill,” McConnell wrote. “Before the pandemic, we had the best economy in 50 years. We should not raise taxes under the guise of an infrastructure bill and send our economy in the wrong direction.”
Last October, Biden had already threatened to end using hydraulic fracturing technology to harvest oil and natural gas, a process that enabled the U.S. to become energy independent while creating millions of American jobs. Now Biden wants to spend billions of dollars on solar panels and wind farms.
The left-wing Mother Jones website observed that Biden’s jobs plan “is really a climate bill” and noting that “it’s the closest we’ve come to a realization of the Green New Deal, an ambitious collection of progressive proposals to combat climate change, racial injustice, and gender inequality.”
“We simply cannot afford another Green New Deal disguised as an infrastructure bill,” Rep. Sam Graves, the top Republican on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, said.