In advance of his speech on infrastructure, CNN released details of the Biden administration’s infrastructure proposal. Funding improvements to roads, bridges, railways and other infrastructure has been a central piece of Biden’s recovery plans. He has said that it will create “really good-paying jobs” and help the nation compete better.
Biden’s eight-year plan would spend $621 billion on roads, bridges, public transit, rail, ports, waterways, airports and electric vehicles in service of improving air quality, reducing congestion and limiting greenhouse gas emissions.
His proposal calls for allocating $115 billion to modernize 20,000 miles of highways, roads and main streets, and $20 billion to improve road safety for all users. It would fix the “most economically significant large bridges” and repair the worst 10,000 smaller bridges.
Biden would also invest $85 billion to modernize existing transit and help agencies expand their systems to meet demand. This would double federal funding for public transit.
Another $80 billion would go to address Amtrak’s repair backlog and modernize the Northeast Corridor line between Boston and Washington, D.C. – the line Biden relied on for decades to get home to Delaware – as well as to connect more cities. Also, the president would funnel $25 billion to airports and $17 billion to inland waterways, ports and ferries.
Biden is also proposing to accelerate the shift to electric vehicles with a $174 billion investment in the electric vehicle market. It includes giving consumers rebates and tax incentives to buy American-made electric vehicles and establishing grant and incentive programs to build a national network of 500,000 charging stations by 2030. It would also replace 50,000 diesel transit vehicles and electrify at least 20% of yellow school buses.
The infrastructure plan is part of a larger piece of legislation, The American Jobs Plan.
Here’s how Biden plans to pay for it:
- Corporate tax hike: Biden would raise the corporate income tax rate to 28%, up from 21%. The rate had been as high as 35% before former President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans cut taxes in 2017.
- Global minimum tax: The proposal would increase the minimum tax on U.S. corporations to 21% and calculate it on a country-by-country basis to deter companies from sheltering profits in international tax havens.
- Tax on book income: The president would levy a 15% minimum tax on the income the largest corporations report to investors, known as book income, as opposed to the income reported to the Internal Revenue Service.
- Corporate inversions: Biden would make it harder for U.S. companies to acquire or merge with a foreign business to avoid paying U.S. taxes by claiming to be a foreign company. And he wants to encourage other countries to adopt strong minimum taxes on corporations, including by denying certain deductions to foreign companies based in countries without such a tax.