Biden Moves EVs and Batteries to the Center of Economic Policy
He is selling his $2 trillion plan as a middle-class jobs program, but it’s also a weapon for economic war
On a coast-to-coast, New York-to-San Francisco trip in 1919, Dwight Eisenhower discovered that you could barely cross the country by car, the roads were so run down. After he became president 40 years later, he decided to fix this by building a first-rate, nationwide highway system. We still drive on the result: some 40,000 miles of highways built for the equivalent of more than $200 billion in today’s dollars.
President-elect Joe Biden’s $2 trillion transportation agenda is the most ambitious since Eisenhower, putting the electric car, the train, and renovated roads and bridges at the center of American economic and jobs policy.
The plan is to expand intercity rail systems, reinvigorate Amtrak, install 500,000 EV charging stations — a must if large numbers of consumers are to take the plunge to electric — and pump more dollars into EV and advanced battery research.
A big question is whether, at a time Republicans have already expressed exhaustion with big spending bills, Biden can get it through Congress. In particular, for the last couple of decades, Republicans have treated EVs…
