Biden’s Green New Deal is a government subsidy for the Left
Timothy P. Carney
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Democrats use government power to turn their own obsessions into massive industries that, in turn, fund Democrats.
President Joe Biden’s Green New Deal is the latest such undertaking. Biden plans to build an “American Climate Corps” that will use taxpayer dollars not only to advance environmentalist goals from climate adaptation to the promotion of politically favored energy sources.
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But this “climate corps,” beginning with a modest budget of mere tens of millions of dollars, is also a long-term effort to build an army of government employees who use public power to advance progressive ideological priorities and thus to entrench a permanent, monied, taxpayer-funded lobby for such causes.
Check out this report on the announcement from NPR:
“President Biden’s climate policy adviser Ali Zaidi told reporters that the program has broader goals beyond addressing the climate crisis.
“‘We’re opening up pathways to good-paying careers, lifetimes of being involved in the work of making our communities more fair, more sustainable, more resilient,’ Zaidi said. The program will pay participants, and most positions will not require previous experience. The administration is also proposing new regulations aimed at making it easier for participants to enter the federal public service after the program.”
Look at the slightly more aggressive framing from Biden’s outsider advisers who hatched the plan for — and loudly advocated — a Climate Corps: “We need millions of people, especially young people, employed to do the essential work of averting climate catastrophe and building a fair and equitable new economy.”
Note the talk of equity and fairness. This is not merely about pollution and greenhouse gases. Like so much of the 21st Century Left, everything is about everything all of the time.
Climate Corps is intended to build a pipeline for activists on all sorts of issues — economics, environment, race — to take taxpayer funding in the Climate Corps and then get embedded in the federal bureaucracy.
Progressive author Naomi Klein laid out the strategy in her book This Changes Everything: The Left wants to use the threat of a climate catastrophe to reshape the economy and politics in its utopian vision.
Biden is not a utopianist, but he is a practical Democratic politician. He sure sees the long-term benefits to his party of launching such a climate corps that then feeds into the bureaucracy.
For starters, government employees are easy to unionize, and then those government union dues all flow to the Democratic Party. Secondly, if you create thousands of jobs and new branches of government aimed at transitioning our energy use and advancing some idea of economic equity, then you create a well-funded lobby for left-wing causes that never needs to justify its existence, because it has perpetual funding from the taxpayer.
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Imagine if we created a national corps for firearms training aimed at creating a better-armed citizenry. Or if we made a federally funded army of pro-lifers and shoveled millions of taxpayer dollars at pro-life crisis pregnancy centers. That would be great for the pro-life cause. But it wouldn’t be right.
Biden is doing just that here, but for his own side. Climate change is the occasion. Building a permanent political advantage is the goal.