Biden’s Legacy: He Didn’t Build That
As President Joe Biden exits the White House, it’s worth looking back—not to his presidency, but to more than a decade ago, when Barack Obama was president and Biden was still second in command.
In July 2012, Obama delivered a speech in which the signature line was, “You didn’t build that.” The speech was, among other things, an address about the size of government, the efficiency of the public and private sectors, and the value of government in getting big things done.
“We’ve already made a trillion dollars’ worth of cuts,” Obama said. “We can make some more cuts in programs that don’t work, and make government work more efficiently.” But ultimately, he argued, government was responsible for so much private success. “If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help,” he said. “There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”
The speech became a point of political contention, with Republicans and their allies saying that Obama was insulting small business owners, and Democrats and media fact-checking organizations—but I repeat myself—insisting that his remarks had been willfully misconstrued and taken out of context. If you want, you can read the entire speech here.
But let’s set aside the partisan context quibbling for a moment, and just focus on that one key passage: “Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that.”
Over the last four years, President Biden supported the investment of billions of dollars of taxpayer money in infrastructure—and, in particular, high-tech green energy infrastructure such as high-speed rail, rural broadband, and electric vehicle charging stations.
And what happened was: He didn’t build that.
The money was authorized, but the projects didn’t come to completion. As Politico reported last month in an overview of Biden’s signature green energy infrastructure projects, “a $42 billion expansion of broadband internet service has yet to connect a single household. Bureaucratic haggling, equipment shortages and logistical challenges mean a $7.5 billion effort to install electric vehicle chargers from coast to coast has so far yielded just 47 stations in 15 states.” According to Politico, Congress authorized more than $1 trillion in spending for Biden’s major climate, clean energy, and infrastructure programs, but more than half of it “has yet to be obligated or is not yet available for agencies to spend.” Many of the big projects that received either subsidies or tax breaks under Biden are still essentially imaginary, and some may not happen at all, depending on what President-elect D
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