Presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden has launched a sweeping $775 billion plan Tuesday to bolster America’s caregiving economy by expanding care for children, the elderly, and the disabled while vowing to create 5 million new jobs.
Biden’s 10-page plan outlines a series of proposals that, all told, will cost $775 billion over 10 years and will be paid for by increasing tax compliance for high-income earners and by reversing tax breaks for real estate investors who make over $400,000 per year.
Seeking to address what Biden calls “the pandemic-driven child care crisis,” the former vice president’s plan calls for building new child care facilities, providing universal pre-school for 3- and 4-year-old children, and helping families cover child care costs by sliding scale subsidies and an up to $8,000 tax credit.
“His plan will cultivate the potential of young children, provide parents—primarily mothers—with career opportunities and economic security, create an additional 1.5 million new, good, early education jobs, and improve the existing jobs for the essential workers who educate our young children,” the plan notes.
The 2020 White House hopeful also promises to ease the financial burden on families with caregiving obligations by expanding access to in-home care for the elderly and bolstering long-term care for those with disabilities.
“Biden will allocate $450 billion to give more people the choice to receive care at home or in supportive community situations, or to have that choice for their loved ones,” the plan states, claiming that this will expand the caregiving and community health workforce by around 1.5 million jobs.
The plan is the third pillar of Biden’s “Build Back Better” recovery strategy, which seeks not just to resurrect the pandemic-ravaged economy but reshape it more fundamentally.
“Biden believes this is no time to just build back to the way things were before, with the old economy’s structural weaknesses and inequalities still in place,” a note on his campaign websites states. “This is the moment to imagine and build a new American economy for our families and the next generation.”
The broader plan promises a minimum wage of at least $15 per hour, strengthening collective bargaining rights, paid sick days, and 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave. It aims to pay for this by reversing some of Trump’s tax cuts and increasing tax collections from the wealthy.
Trump campaign rapid response director Andrew Craft criticized the new caregiving plan, with Fox News citing him as saying that “Biden is proposing yet another nearly $800 billion in federal spending disguised as an economic plan, on top of the $2 trillion spending he proposed just last week—all while purposefully killing millions of good-paying union jobs and then demanding middle-class Americans foot the bill.”
From The Epoch Times
