Following in line with prominent left-wing lawmakers, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden told virtual CNN town hall audiences Thursday there might be no time like the present to expand the scope of federal economic and environmental policy.
According to Biden, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and
its ensuing economic fallout have provided the nation with an
“opportunity” to move forward with progressive policy long believed to
be unachievable — particularly on the issue of climate change.
“We have to look at it totally
differently than we have before,” Biden told hosts Anderson Cooper and
medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta. “I think the way we get through
this is we have to deal with stimulating the economy, but then we have
to deal with recovery. Recovery. And the way you deal with recovery is
you think much bigger than we have before.
“It’s like the New Deal. Think of every
great act, every great change that’s taken place. It’s come out of a
crisis. … What we did, we expanded opportunity. And I think we have an
opportunity to significantly change the mindset of the American people —
things they weren’t ready to do even two, three years ago. …
“We have an opportunity now to take in a
recovery act, a real recovery, we can fundamentally change the science
relating to global warming and we can create, seriously create, 10
million good-paying jobs. We can do it. It’s within our power to do it.”
With the U.S. economy bleeding more than
22 million jobs amid government orders shutting down of so-called
nonessential businesses, according to Axios,
Biden suggested Thursday that government jobs programs in the energy
sector should be an essential part of the coming economic recovery.
Seemingly at the forefront of Biden’s
plan for such an expansion was a nationwide infrastructure program aimed
at introducing roughly 550,000 electric car charging stations along
federal interstates.
