Michael Bastasch
Former Vice President Joe Biden called for repealing tax laws that “reward work not wealth” in what seems to be another gaffe in his newly-released climate change plan.
Biden, the current Democratic presidential front-runner, unveiled his climate change plan Tuesday, which aims to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. Biden’s climate plan calls for $6.7 trillion over a decade.
Biden said the plan would be paid for by reversing the “excesses” of the tax cuts President Donald Trump signed in 2017 and “closing other loopholes in our tax code that reward work not wealth.”
Biden’s campaign likely meant to say it wanted to close loopholes that reward “wealth not work,” and not that it favored taxing labor more than wealth.
Many Democrats running for president in 2020 have released their own far-reaching, climate change plans amid pressure from environmentalists. In releasing his plan, Biden paid lip service to the Green New Deal, championed by New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and far-left activists.
However, reporters quickly discovered Biden’s climate plan used nearly identical to outside activists and even a government website. The Daily Caller News Foundation identified at least five instances of Biden’s campaign using nearly identical language as activists.
Biden’s campaign said it “inadvertently left out” proper citations, but many environmentalists wrote off Biden’s climate plan in the wake of plagiarism allegations.
“It speaks of pulling an all-nighter and reading off of your friend’s essay,” University of California Santa Barbara political scientist Leah Stokes told The Washington Post.
Trump also called out Biden over plagiarism allegations, saying it “is a big problem.”
Biden’s troubled climate plan rollout comes after Ocasio-Cortez’s office botched the rollout of the Green New Deal resolution.
Ocasio-Cortez’s office released a gaffe-filled FAQ sheet in February along with the Green New Deal legislation. The FAQ mentioned getting rid of “farting cows,” air travel, welfare for people “unwilling to work” and language opposed to nuclear power.
The FAQ document was eventually taken offline, and Ocasio-Cortez blamed an unnamed staffer for releasing a draft document — however, the FAQ was first given to NPR, then posted online with edits before being taken down.
Biden’s campaign did not respond to our request for comment.
