This is the first in a new — and, we assume, irregular — series of articles that applaud members of the legacy media when they exhibit the curiosity, skepticism, or objectivity traditionally associated with journalists.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg experienced an unfamiliar degree of scrutiny when he stopped by CNBC’s “Squawk Box” to promote President Joe Biden’s American Jobs Plan last week.
When host Joe Kernen pressed Buttigieg on the administration’s audacious redefinition of the word “infrastructure,” CNBC committed a rare act of journalism.
The Biden administration has promoted the administration’s multi-trillion-dollar plan as an infrastructure bill, due to the bipartisan popularity of rebuilding America’s roads and bridges. In reality, the bill contains a host of new government spending that is completely unrelated to transportation, including hundreds of billions of dollars for long-term care for the elderly and taxpayer-subsidized childcare.
An explainer posted on the official White House website boasts of how the “infrastructure” plan will further “racial equity” through such programs as:
- “Invest[ing] in clean energy to advance climate justice and mitigate the disparate impacts of pollution on communities of color”;
- “$213 billion to produce, preserve, and retrofit more than two million affordable and sustainable places to live” in minority communities;
- “$100 billion in workforce development programs targeted at underserved communities”;
- “$5 billion over 8 years” to combat “gun violence”; and
- unspecified funding for “the creation of a new national lab focused on climate that will be affiliated with an” Historically Black College or University (HBCU)
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) encapsulated the newly capacious definition of “infrastructure” when she wrote the widely ridiculed tweet: “Paid leave is infrastructure. Child care is infrastructure. Caregiving is infrastructure.”
Paid leave is infrastructure.
Child care is infrastructure.
Caregiving is infrastructure.— Kirsten Gillibrand (@SenGillibrand) April 7, 2021
To his credit, Kernen probed the misuse of language with Buttigieg on May 13.
“We’re proposing a usage for the word ‘infrastructure’ that Republicans would say includes every wish list for the Democratic Party going back 50 years,” Kernen told the secretary.
Buttigieg attempted to defend these “other, broader forms of infrastructure” on the grounds that “[t]hey’re all part of the foundation that makes it possible for us to live well.”
“Buttigieg flailed again and offered up a weird corporate-sounding word salad,” wrote Becket Adams at the Washington Examiner.
Kernen responded, “Mr. Secretary, you might as well tell me, ‘You know, you need those roads to drive to free college and free childcare and, therefore, I want to build them.’ So, I mean, come on, come on.”
“You can’t make that jump to ‘everything under the sun is infrastructure and we should spend $100 trillion and give everything to everyone, because that’s what their life is,’” Kernen added. “We don’t have the money. We don’t have the wherewithal.”
Buttigieg insisted money was no concern. “We do have the money; that’s the thing,” he insisted. “We abundantly do have the money, because the bill is paid for, right?”
Unfortunately, Buttigieg’s words are deliberately misleading. The American Jobs Plan is riddled with accounting gimmicks to minimize its cost and make believe it is “revenue neutral.” The American Jobs Plan’s estimated $2.2 trillion price tag only accounts for eight years of spending. Biden says he will offset this by raising the corporate tax to 28% — leaving the U.S. with one of the highest rates in the developed world — and claims it will bring in $2.5 trillion … but that estimate is over 15 years. Clearly, the bill will add to the $28 trillion national debt even under the best circumstances.
The segment marks some of the toughest questioning Buttigieg has experienced since he stepped up his media presence to promote Biden’s spending bill. He was lead guest on Friday evening’s episode of MSNBC’s “The ReidOut,” with Joy Reid; Reid’s final guest of the night blamed this week’s deadly Israeli-Gaza conflict on “Jewish supremacy.”
Rather than explaining the bill’s contents to the American people, much of the media’s coverage has often amounted to little more than extended PR. CBS News and NPR described it as “ambitious,” while ABC News called it “massively ambitious.”
For pushing back against attempts to gaslight the American public about the meaning of commonly accepted words and phrases, Joe Kernen and CNBC deserve our gratitude.
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.
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Source: Dailywire
