Joe Biden in CNN N. H. Town Hall
On Environment:
Will bring polluting country leaders to US to find solutions
85 percent of the pollution that we deal with comes from the rest of the world. I was part of putting together the Paris climate accord. I would immediately rejoin it.
And I would immediately bring in the single biggest polluters in the first 100 days to the United States and say, we have to up the ante in how we move forward.
Source: CNN N. H. Town Hall on eve of 2020 N. H. primary
Feb 5, 2020
On Families & Children:
$15 minimum wage and triple money for Title 1 schools
I talk about the working poor all the time. No one should be working 40 hours a week and living in poverty. That's why we have to raise the standard of $15 an hour for every worker in America. We have to provide for opportunities at the early stages.
I propose that we triple the amount of money we spend for Title I schools, which means every child, age 3, 4, and 5, will be in school, not daycare, school.
Source: CNN N. H. Town Hall on eve of 2020 N. H. primary
Feb 5, 2020
On Foreign Policy:
Putin wants to weaken NATO and democracy
Q: Russian President Vladimir Putin has interfered with Georgian, Ukrainian, French, German, U.K., and U.S. elections. He has occupied territories of Georgia and Ukraine. What will you do to end all of these attacks, which some have said are acts of war?
BIDEN: Well, I think they are. They're acts that are violating our sovereignty. I'm the guy who went over to our NATO colleagues and worked out an agreement before their last series of elections a year and a half ago, where we got everybody running
for office to take a pledge that they would let anyone know that if there was any interference taking place, they would reject any outside help. And one of the very reasons why the president got impeached is because he went to outside folks, seeking
help in our election. Putin is a guy who, in fact, is not anything remotely approaching a democrat with a small "d." His entire objective is to weaken Eastern Europe, bring down NATO, so that he does not have to face the constituency he faces now.
Source: CNN N. H. Town Hall on eve of 2020 N. H. primary
Feb 5, 2020
On Foreign Policy:
We should not have abandoned the Kurds
Thousands of Kurds died defeating ISIS. And what happened? This president yielded to Erdogan and he said that we would withdraw our forces along the Turkish border between Turkey and Syria.
You have Kurdish women holding up babies saying, please, don't leave us. Those of you who are military personnel, you saw those men and women in our military and uniform with their heads down. They're ashamed.
Source: CNN N. H. Town Hall on eve of 2020 N. H. primary
Feb 5, 2020
On Health Care:
Biden Cancer Initiative: data from multiple researchers
I believe we can cure some cancers and make other cancers a chronic disease. [In 2017,] I left office and set up the Biden Cancer Initiative. Docs don't play well in the sandbox together. It's not that they don't work like the devil. They work hard. But
now we can do a million, billion calculations a second. We're in a position where we can exchange information that's real. And what I was able to do with the Cancer Initiative was to turn this from an objective into a movement. We're learning that there
may be multiple drugs needed to deal with a particular strain of cancer, just like with AIDS. But the idea of getting folks working on the same cancer strain to give you their information is almost zero. So I suggested, assign a numerical value to the
effort you have underway, if you put your research on the table, and then we find a cure, it's worth 28% of whatever we do, yours is 17%, and go down the list. If, in fact, you get a cure for a particular drug, you get 28% or you get 16%.
Source: CNN N. H. Town Hall on eve of 2020 N. H. primary
Feb 5, 2020
On Health Care:
Tax capital gains at bracket levels to pay for health plan
Q: The Affordable Care Act has been gutted, most notably the individual mandate. BIDEN: I'm going to restore the cuts, reduce out-of-pocket expenses and premiums, and add a Medicare option for those who want it. If you have private insurance, and
you like it, keep it. If they cancel the policy, you can buy into the Biden plan. I'm adding $1 billion for dealing with drug abuse and opioids. I can pay for it by making sure people pay their capital gains at whatever their tax rate is.
Source: CNN N. H. Town Hall on eve of 2020 N. H. primary
Feb 5, 2020
On Health Care:
Must divulge cost of health care legislation
I have been around a while. I have gotten a lot of important bills passed through the Congress. Can you imagine going to Congress, Democrats or Republicans, and saying, by the way, let's have Medicare for all? How much is it going to cost? Who's
going to pay for it? Well, I don't know. We will all find out later. You have to level with the American people, tell them what you think your plan is going to cost, how you're going to pay for it, and how you're going to get it done.
Source: CNN N. H. Town Hall on eve of 2020 N. H. primary
Feb 5, 2020
On Health Care:
Invest $50B in new agency to fight cancer
When I was asked to put together this cancer initiative, they asked why I brought in NASA. Guess who knows more about radiation than anybody in the world? We have a thing called DARPA, the defense agency. They came up with geo-positioning, and a
whole range of other things. It's a separate agency, works on specific programs that will impact defense capabilities. I want to do the same thing for the Department of Health and provide ARPA [for health] and invest $50 billion in that agency.
Source: CNN N. H. Town Hall on eve of 2020 N. H. primary
Feb 5, 2020
On Principles & Values:
If Putin interferes, there will be consequences
The president stands on the stage at the G- 20, looks at Vladimir Putin and says, he told me he didn't interfere. When 18 of our security agencies said we have proof, I guarantee you there's proof. And what are we doing? What are our friends in the
Congress doing? They're blocking the ability to make sure we secure the election. I know President Putin, and he knows me. He knows there will be consequences if he tries to interfere with our election.
Source: CNN N. H. Town Hall on eve of 2020 N. H. primary
Feb 5, 2020
On Social Security:
6.2% FICA tax on all earnings over $400,000
Q: How exactly will you protect Social Security?BIDEN: There's two pieces to the protection. #1, I'm going to make sure that we are able to have Social Security for the students here when their time comes. #2, I'm going to make sure that those folks
who lost a spouse, or Social Security payment was reduced, or they're outliving way beyond their coverage, that they can have it raised.
Q: How are you going to do that?
BIDEN: Right now, we pay about 6.2 percent out of our salary, up to roughly
$130,000. I have been proposing for some time that we do the same thing for everybody making over $400,000. So, for example, you, in fact, make 60 grand, you get 6.2% taken out of your salary. If you make $130,000, you get 6.2%. If you're making a
million, you pay the exact same amount as someone making $130,000. By moving to keep the tax at 6.2% for people making every dollar over $400,000, we can pay for everything I'm talking about. And we can make it solvent, for all of these kids here.
Source: CNN N. H. Town Hall on eve of 2020 N. H. primary
Feb 5, 2020
On Technology:
Build half million charging stations on highways
Every new plan we have for infrastructure has to be green. For example, we're going to be able to place 500,000 charging stations along every new highway we build.
We can afford to do that. We're going to own the electric vehicle market.
Source: CNN N. H. Town Hall on eve of 2020 N. H. primary
Feb 5, 2020
Page last updated: Mar 11, 2020