By Lambert Strether of Corrente. The jury is still out on whether President Biden’s American Jobs Plan will turn out to be underpowered, or not. My guess is that it will be; the Obama Alumni Association, for all its protestations, has form. Further, looking at the plan, you notice headlines with goals like “Rebuild clean drinking water infrastructure,” to be achieved by eliminating all lead pipes and service lines. That’s good, but not the same thing as providing a clean drinking water infrastructure as such; that would require cleaning ground water polluted by nutrients, for example. (I also attempted to penetrate the wildly prolix and entirely evidence-free “Fact Sheet,” but it’s even worse.) Of course, the real test, I would suppose, is not whether the Jobs Plan fulfills whatever promises it has made, if any, but whether the funding doled out to the local “gentry” — in this instance, the contractors — has a sufficiently sweetening effect, and whether enough jobs are created or well in sight, all by the mid-terms in 2020. The Democrats better get cracking!