Biden Plans Massive Spending Binge On Green Energy After Losing Taxpayers Hundreds Of Millions On Failed Investments: Report
Biden is developing a stimulus plan similar to former President Barack Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, a $787 billion economic stimulus package meant to pull the U.S. out of the Great Recession. Obama’s stimulus was the largest in American history prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.
During the Obama administration, then Vice President Joe Biden oversaw recovery-act spending and personally announced hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of loan guarentees awarded to companies that went bankrupt within a few years.
Two solar power companies, Solyndra and Abound Solar, both went bankrupt in 2011 after receiving loan guarantees under Obama’s stimulus worth $535 million and $400 million, respectively. The small automaker Fisker received a $529 million loan guarantee to manufacture hybrid and electric vehicles before going bankrupt in 2013.
A123 Systems, which made batteries for Fisker, announced bankruptcy shortly after the car company and after receiving a $279 million loan guarantee. The failed stimulus investments cost U.S. taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars.Biden now wants to use the Obama-era spending binge as a blueprint to craft his own climate stimulus to pump up the U.S. economy and push its transition toward green energy, according to The New York Times. Biden and other Democrats are convinced that blowing up spending on green energy and infrastructure, which was allotted $90 billion under Obama’s plan, will avoid the series of costly failures that plagued the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. As the Times reported:
Now, 12 years later, President Biden is preparing the details of a new, vastly larger, economic stimulus plan that again would use government spending to unite the goals of fighting climate change and restoring the economy. While clean energy spending was just a fraction of the Obama stimulus, Mr. Biden wants to make it the centerpiece of his proposal for trillions of dollars, not billions, on government grants, loans, and tax incentives to spark renewable power, energy efficiency and electric car production.
The risk to taxpayers may stall the bill in Congress, but Biden and his Democratic allies plan to argue that the increased level of investment, along with increased market demand for green energy, will ensure the success of the stimulus this time around.
The Biden administration is also currently working on a plan to implement tax increases on Americans worth about $3 trillion over 10 years. The tax increase would be used in part to fund his massive spending on green energy and electric infrastructure to transition the U.S. economy away from fossil fuels. Overall, the Biden administration is preparing for a spending plan worth as much as $4 trillion. As The Daily Wire reported:
President Joe Biden is expected to announce a massive spending bill later this week focused on addressing “infrastructure needs,” and the multi-trillion-dollar piece of legislation, which follows closely on the heels of a nearly $2 trillion COVID-19 relief package, will likely require a major tax hike.
The Washington Post reported Tuesday that the Biden administration is exploring a major — $3 trillion — tax hike, mostly on wealthy Americans and corporations, and a near-complete rollback of President Donald Trump’s tax breaks.
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