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Democrats couldn’t say it, because “Green New Deal” supposedly became some kind of tainted and negative phrase (I’ll save my rant on how to win messaging battles like this for another day), but the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law combined to really basically become the “Green New Deal” our country desperately needed — not just for fighting climate change, but also for creating manufacturing jobs in the United States again. Throw on the CHIPS and Science Act, and Joe Biden and Democrats in Congress did what many Americans have been begging politicians to do for decades — revive or re-inject life into the US manufacturing sector.
We’ve written about this numerous times, and I talked about it at length with Scott Cooney recently in this YouTube video, but humans are very visual, and perhaps there’s no better way to demonstrate this than with a good graph. Luckily, FRED has created one, and CleanTechnica reader “Jason” recently pointed me in that direction. Here’s the graph:
Yes, that’s overall construction spending in the manufacturing sector, but there’s no secret what the spike in spending is coming from.
Interestingly, in that FRED graph, you can see the growth in spending that came under the Obama administration thanks to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) as well, and just as I said in that YouTube discussion, as big and helpful as those green economy policies were, the policies Biden got passed were much bigger. And we’re not just talking about commitments or promises or broad plans, we’re talking about actual construction spending for manufacturing facilities. These factories are getting built.
What you also see is construction spending for new manufacturing capacity was stagnant during Donald Trump’s first presidency. It’s no secret to anyone paying attention, but Trump didn’t do crap when it comes to creating blue collar jobs and more manufacturing might in the US. The con man from Queens talks a big game but was not there to help the working man. But let’s not get too sidetracked by that. We can get excited for the manufacturing boom in the US, even if few realize Biden was the most blue collar president the US has had in decades.
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