(LibertySons.org) – President Joe Biden made a trip to Las Vegas on December 8 and addressed union members at the Carpenters International Training Center. However, after the president appeared to have trouble remembering the amount of spending associated with the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the White House quietly fixed the transcript, hoping nobody would notice Biden’s blunder.
Biden spoke with union carpenters about the jobs that $8 billion in railroad investments would create, many of them union jobs. One project, a $3 billion Brightline high-speed railway slated to connect San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas, could even employ many of the union members he addressed.
The president quoted estimates that found that as many as 35,000 construction jobs could result from the project. Once built, the projections suggested the railway, serving up to 11 million passengers annually, could generate up to a thousand ongoing jobs for rail and signal workers, onboard workers, shop artisans, and more.
Comparing himself with former President Donald Trump, Biden said the Trump administration touted Infrastructure Week during its four-year term. By contrast, he said his administration was focusing on creating Infrastructure Decade, spending over “One billion three hundred million… trillion three hundred million dollars.”
The way Biden said and then corrected the number made it seem like a fictional number. In a post to X, formerly Twitter, one critic, Oren Ross of the New York Post, accused the president of sounding a lot like his 4-year-old. The White House Transcript, once updated, read, “Over 1,300,000,000 — $1,000,300,000,000.” Typically, cost estimates for the law run between $1 trillion and $1.2 trillion.
Biden has made no secret of his fondness for trains and, by extension, railway projects. Once again, he told the carpenters the story of commuting between Washington, DC, and Delaware as a young senator and the friendship he developed with an Amtrak employee named Angelo. He said Angelo had calculated that he’d traveled more than a million miles by rail. Critics have also questioned whether Biden has taken poetic license with portions of that story.
~Here’s to Our Liberty!
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