On Thursday night, at a CNN townhall conducted by CNN’s Anderson Cooper, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden was asked whether the Green New Deal was “too much.” He answered, “No, I don’t think it’s too much.”
The question posed to Biden was, “Are you a firm supporter of the Green New Deal, and how will you make sure our communities are protected?”
Cooper interjected, “Let me jump in, though; she was asking about a Green New Deal. Do you back that or do you think it’s too much?”
Biden responded, “No, I don’t think it’s too much.” He continued, “I have my own deal. I’ve laid it out in detail. The Democratic party’s adopted it as a platform. It requires for us to move in a direction to fundamentally change the way in which we deal with the environment.”
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) said in June 2019 that her Green New Deal resolution would cost at least $10 trillion to implement.
Fox Business reported in July 2019, “A new study released by libertarian think tank The Competitive Enterprise Institute and Power the Future (which was launched by an alum of the Charles Koch Institute) found that the average American household in Florida, New Hampshire, New Mexico and Pennsylvania would be on the hook for more than $70,000 during the first year the plan was implemented.”
“I’m the guy that ran the Recovery Act, which invested over $90 billion in bringing down the cost of renewable energy so it’s now more competitive that it is for coal or for oil or for gas,” Biden boasted Thursday night. “And so there’s no reason why we can’t transition, in an orderly way, making — and by the way, before I actually went through the whole thing I sat down with every one of the major unions. They all endorsed me. And I said, ‘Look, this is what it’s going to mean for you. It’s not only good for the environment; it’s gonna provide jobs and you’re not gonna lose your job. You’re not gonna lose your job. Not producing the same energy, producing a different kind of energy.’”
Biden’s reference to the Recovery Act was about the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The Obama administration stated of the act, “Through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (Recovery Act), President Obama made the largest single investment in clean energy in history, providing more than $90 billion in strategic clean energy investments and tax incentives to promote job creation and the deployment of low-carbon technologies, and leveraging approximately $150 billion in private and other non-federal capital for clean energy investments.”
Biden stated that the stimulus plan would “literally drop kick us out of the recession.” But on the fifth anniversary of Obama signing the act, The Wall Street Journal noted:
Five years ago today, President Barack Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act into law. The $830 billion spending blowout was sold by the White House as a way to keep unemployment from rising above 8%. But the stimulus would fail on its own terms. 2009 marked the first of four straight years when unemployment averaged more than 8%. And of course the unemployment rate would have been even worse in those years and still today if so many people had not quit the labor force, driving labor-participation rates to 1970s levels.