No country for burly men

ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE

In a reprise of the 2009 protests against Obama’s “shovel ready” recovery projects, the Left is screaming that Biden’s New Green Eel Project isn’t addressing the needs of diaper changers and bedpan dumpers. Of course, the real goal here is to destroy America’s energy industry and return the country to the mercy of the Saudis and Putin, but the secondary objective is to skyrocket spending for every long-dreamed-of socialist program. Neither has anything to do about saving the planet.

WaPo: Biden's climate plan will not address gender and racial inequality

Women and minorities have suffered disproportionately from the pandemic recession and must be part of any comprehensive recovery program. 

The Biden administration's quest to green the American economy promises to create millions of good jobs "filled by diverse, local and well-trained workers, including women and people of color." But these jobs will exacerbate long-standing and worsening economic injustices due to their concentration in male-dominated fields. 

Due to COVID-19, gender disparities in unpaid care work have more than tripled (sextupled for Black and Hispanic women) and women have experienced job losses at a higher rate than men for the first time in history. Non-whites have simultaneously suffered significantly higher pandemic mortality rates and lower resilience in the face of recession due to systemically weaker pre-pandemic economic positions. The interaction of these realities has undermined the economic stability of women of color, in particular. 

To tackle these injustices, the Biden administration should adopt a broader "green-plus" recovery that prioritizes inherently low-carbon jobs in the care, education and service sectors, in addition to the valuable unpaid labor overlooked in conventional measures of economic wellbeing.

Have we heard this before? Yes, we have. The first time as tragedy, the second as farce

Christina Hoff Sommers June 29, 2009

Last November, President-elect Obama addressed the devastation in the construction and manufacturing industries by proposing an ambitious New Deal-like program to rebuild the nation's infrastructure. He called for a two-year "shovel ready" stimulus program to modernize roads, bridges, schools, electrical grids, public transportation, and dams and made reinvigorating the hardest-hit sectors of the economy the goal of the legislation that would become the recovery act. 

Women's groups were appalled. Grids? Dams? Opinion pieces immediately appeared in major newspapers with titles like "Where are the New Jobs for Women?" and "The Macho Stimulus Plan." A group of "notable feminist economists" circulated a petition that quickly garnered more than 600 signatures, calling on the president-elect to add projects in health, child care, education, and social services and to "institute apprenticeships" to train women for "at least one third" of the infrastructure jobs. At the same time, more than 1,000 feminist historians signed an open letter urging Obama not to favor a "heavily male-dominated field" like construction: "We need to rebuild not only concrete and steel bridges but also human bridges." As soon as these groups became aware of each other, they formed an anti-stimulus plan action group called WEAVE-- Women's Equality Adds Value to the Economy.

They were right indeed. Our incoming president did what many sensible men do when confronted by a chorus of female complaint: He changed his plan. He added health, education, and other human infrastructure components to the proposal. And he tasked Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein, Joseph Biden's chief economist, with preparing an extraordinary report that calculated not only the number of jobs the plan would likely create, but the gender composition of the various employment sectors and the division of largess between women and men. 

Romer and Bernstein delivered "The Job Impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan" on January 10. They estimated that "the total number of created jobs likely to go to women is roughly 42 percent." Lest anyone miss the point, they added that since women had held only 20 percent of the jobs lost in the recession, the stimulus package now "skews job creation somewhat towards women." 

[snip] A recent Associated Press story reports: "Stimulus Funds Go to Social Programs Over 'Shovel-ready' Projects." A team of six AP reporters who have been tracking the funds find that the $300 billion sent to the states is being used mainly for health care, education, unemployment benefits, food stamps, and other social services. According to Chris Whately, director of the Council of State Governments, "We all talked about 'shovel-ready' since September and assumed it was a whole lot of paving and building when, in fact, that's not the case."