Editor’s note: This My Turn was updated to remove a statement implying that moderate Democrats voted for a bill without first reading it. A paragraph implying that the passage of the bill will allow immigrants to obtain citizenship without going through the legal procedure has also been removed. A statement regarding a change in terminology to “non-citizen immigrants” was added.
The bait is a small amount of real infrastructure and mostly socialist entitlement programs that will make us dependent on government, destroy our free enterprise system and take away our individual rights that Americans have fought and died for over 245 years.
Speaker Pelosi used extortion techniques to get moderate Democrats to vote for the $3.5 trillion Green New Deal Bill in exchange for voting on the $1.2 trillion so-called infrastructure bill first. The far left wing of the Democratic Party refused to allow the infrastructure to be voted on first and the moderate Democrats made that a demand.
So, to placate the far left, Pelosi told the moderates that she would allow the $1.2 trillion bill be voted on first if they agreed now to vote for the $3.5 trillion bill. The moderates caved and the extortion worked.
Now our NH representatives can go home and tell their constituents that they got money for road and bridges. But they will not tell them that they traded their individual rights and canceled the power of their votes to get a few billion for real infrastructure and a few trillion for social programs.
Why can we not be honest with the American people and just do infrastructure legislation and debate social programs separately?
If one reads the breakdown of the $3.5 trillion bill, there is $107 billion for the judiciary committee with instructions to address “lawful permanent status for qualified immigrants.” Homeland Secretary Mayorkas said recently that we will no longer call people illegal aliens. We will now call them non-citizen immigrants.
$332 billion will be given to the banking committee with the instructions to override local zoning and allow subsidized housing in every community across America. $726 billion will be for free community college tuition, child care and universal pre-K. $135 billion will be used to reduce carbon emissions. $300 billion will create a civilian climate change corps to clean up our national forests.
Here’s why these global warming funds will be wasting the taxpayers hard earned dollars.
John Kerry, Biden’s climate envoy, has stated that if America reduces its carbon footprint to zero, it would not solve the problem of global warming. China emits 28% of the carbon in the world today. Developing countries emit 23% and India emits 7% of the world carbon. That’s 58% of the world carbon emissions.
America, the largest economy in the world, emits 15%. That’s because of our innovation in things like the catalytic convertors. We need to use our foreign policy initiative to get China and developing countries to achieve America’s carbon footprint if we want to solve this problem.
Do you remember Solyndra Corp? This company was a major contributor to the Obama-Biden campaign. They had a new technology for making solar panels. Obama-Biden gave them $500 million in federally guaranteed loans.
Solyndra could not compete with solar panels made in China. They went bankrupt and our hard-earned tax dollars were wasted away. Do not let this misuse of our tax dollars again go to a wish list of global warming projects in America when the problem is in China.
These global warming initiatives will take away New Hampshire workers’ jobs today with the hope of providing skilled, high paying jobs of tomorrow. Trying to take our carbon footprint to zero will put a greater regulatory burden on our employers and increase the cost of gas at the pump. These actions will take away existing jobs in New Hampshire.
Our public schools’ NAEP achievement scores indicate that more than 50% of our high school graduates are not career ready in science and math. The high paying jobs that are promised in this Green New Deal will need employees with strong math and science skills. Our graduates, who are not going to college, will not be qualified to take these hoped-for jobs. Meanwhile, in New Hampshire we have thousands of jobs begging for employees today.
New Hampshire citizens cannot afford more wasteful spending. For the first time, America has a national debt higher than our Gross Domestic Product. In short, America is broke. Just like your household will be broke if your debts exceed your assets and you had little income to pay those debts.
When the Federal Reserve Bank finally comes to the conclusion that they have to fight inflation with higher interest, the payments on our national debt can exceed the amount we spend on defending our nation.
If you want to keep your individual liberties and not create a socialist country, tell our Congressional delegation to vote no on this $3.5 trillion bill.
(Joseph Mendola lives in Warner.)