White House Releases $2 Trillion Infrastructure and Jobs Plan

Today, ahead of a speech President Biden will make in Pittsburgh, the White House released the American Jobs Plan, which is intended to rebuild the country’s infrastructure, including building, preserving, and retrofitting more than two million homes along with investments in transportation, clean drinking water, the electric grid and broadband, schools, and Veterans Affairs hospitals; create jobs for and raise the wages of home care workers; and revitalize manufacturing. In each of these areas, the White House looks to accomplish its goals with a focus on addressing racial injustices, climate impacts, and clean energy and infrastructure.

While the plan does not detail all investments in specific programs, it states the president is calling on Congress to invest $213 billion in affordable, sustainable housing. This includes:

• Producing, preserving, and retrofitting more than one million rental homes through a combination of tax credits, formula funding, grants, and project-based rental assistance;
• Building and rehabilitating more than 500,000 homes for low- and middle-income home  buyers, including through the passage of the Neighborhood Homes Investment Act;
• Eliminating exclusionary zoning and harmful land use policies by establishing a new competitive grant program to award funding to jurisdictions that take concrete steps to eliminate barriers to producing affordable housing;
• Investing $40 billion in public housing capital needs;
• Extending and expanding commercial efficiency tax credits for weatherization and establishing a $27 billion Clean Energy and Sustainability Accelerator focused on mobilizing private investment for distributed energy resources; retrofits of residential, commercial, and municipal buildings; and clean transportation.

The plan would be paid for through corporate tax increases and other changes to the corporate tax code that are expected to raise more than $2 trillion in 15 years, which the White House says would more than pay for the investments in the plan. These include raising the corporate tax rate to 28 percent. The corporate rate had been set at 35 percent until the 2017 reform of the tax code, which dropped the corporate tax rate to 21 percent.