PHILADELPHIA — President Joe Biden called Friday for a major investment in rail service to create jobs and fight climate change as he visited Philadelphia to promote his sweeping $2 trillion infrastructure proposal.
“Today we have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to position Amtrak and rail” to “play a central role” in the country’s economic future, Biden said at a blustery railyard just outside 30th Street Station.
Touting a vision of new connections like one from Scranton and Allentown to New York, Biden, in a blue hat, said such investments would spark the economy with cleaner transportation options.
“It’s going to provide jobs and also accommodate jobs,” he said.
Biden spoke alongside the tracks at an Amtrak railyard, with Acela trains behind him and the Comcast Center looming high in the distance.
Biden’s $2 trillion infrastructure and jobs plan includes an $80 billion investment in Amtrak. The money, part of $621 billion set aside for transportation infrastructure, would help the railroad ease its repair backlog, modernize the Northeast Corridor, improve existing routs, and create new rail connections, the administration says.
Biden’s visit came at the end of the week in which he marked his 100th day in office, delivered his first formal address to a joint session of Congress, and rolled out the third piece of a massive economic agenda — his “American Families Plan” calling for spending $1.8 trillion on education, child care, and family leave. The stop in Philadelphia was part of a tour the White House has launched to promote the next steps in Biden’s agenda.
He has used his first three months in office to sign a $1.9 trillion pandemic relief program, and then followed up with his plans to invest in infrastructure and the clean energy economy, and expand the social safety net to make education and child care more affordable. Together, Biden argues that the proposals will transition the country to a clean, 21st-century economy while uplifting the middle class, low-income families, and people of color who have often been left out of recent economic booms.
Biden has called for raising taxes on corporations and people earning more than $400,000 a year to pay for the vast agenda.
In visiting Philadelphia, Biden returned to the city where he had based his campaign headquarters and a state that proved critical to his victory in 2020, and which next year will again host nationally influential races for governor and U.S. Senate.
A day earlier he had visited another vital swing state, Georgia, to press his case for a more active role for government.
Republicans have blasted Biden’s plans as an excessive and counter-productive expansion of government that, they argue, will stunt economic growth and spark inflation.
“He is governing as someone who wants to go down as a president who massively expands the size and scope and cost of the federal government,” Sen. Pat Toomey (R., Pa.) said this week. “It’s quite stunning when you consider the scale of his proposals.”
The size and scope of the proposals, which, along with traditional nuts-and-bolts infrastructure, include a long list of liberal priorities, such as $400 billion for home and community care, will test Biden and Democratic leaders, given the party’s narrow control of Congress. A group of Republicans, including Toomey, have offered a counterproposal but they and the White House are far apart in their visions of how big an infrastructure program should go.
Biden has long had a deep affinity for Amtrak. His decades riding the rails between Wilmington and Washington, D.C. as a senator from Delaware became an central part of his political identity.
In 2017, he estimated he had taken more than 8,200 round trips covering more than two million miles.
“The president’s regular riding of Amtrak underscores the value and the viability,” of intercity rail, said Amtrak CEO William Flynn.
The investment the president has proposed “would allow us to catch up from frankly decades of underfunding,” while adding service to new cities, Flynn said.
Biden was set to be introduced by a conductor who had regularly worked on some of Biden’s trips between Wilmington to Washington.
The visit was Biden’s third to Pennsylvania since mid-March. He went to Delaware County to promote his stimulus bill, and then launched his infrastructure pitch in Pittsburgh.
Amtrak officials noted that 30th Street Station is one of the rail lines’ busiest hubs, and is the home base of their new Acela trains.
