>> with the iowa and new hampshire primary caucus behind them, here's a look at upcoming important event for the remaining democratic presidential candidates. the nevada caucus, often called the first in the west, is savvier -- separate, figuring 22nd. nevada cents 36 delegates to the convention. south carolina's is saturday, figuring 29th, with 54 pledged delegates. an super tuesday, were 15 states and one territory allocate a third of democratic pledged delegates is march 3.

our campaign 20/20 coverage continues with pete buttigieg speaking to caucus-goers at a town nevada's capital, carson city, live, monday at 2:00 p.m. eastern on c-span. [applause] >> they just wrapped up with democratic residential candidates in las vegas. joe biden was among the candidates who sat down to talk about jobs and infrastructure. his caucus will be held saturday. [applause] >> i guess they like you. [laughter] collection? -- election? >> no, i said they liked you. >> oh,. jerry: thank you for joining us. biden: thank you for having me. jerry: infrastructure needs

work. mr. biden: across the board. jerry: with a $1 trillion deficit, it's hard to know where to start, but every democrat thinks the country move away from a fossil feel energy and transportation system to a more green, climate friendly system. so the question is if you've got set priorities, where do you start? fixing the old infrastructure or moving onto a climate friendly green infrastructure? mr. biden: i think it's a foster oyster. i think you do both. i think you start with fixing the broken infrastructure in a modern way. for example, every one of those bridges we're talking about, we're going to spend billions more over time. you see people losing their lives. but also, we modernize them in terms of making them energy-efficient. for theant to do

highways to be prepared, put in literally 500,000 new charging stations in 2020. and we can do that. when i say that to people, and of this is an intersection crowd. you get it. i say that to ordinary people and they say wait a minute, charging stations? you see those scooters going around? they plug in. there's a lot we can do to create good jobs that are labor $50-$60 anre paying hour, and at the same time increase the infrastructure while making it green. i know i only have a little time. jeanne: this is the second most important question. how do you pay for it? taxes, how do you pay for it?

fmr. v.p. biden: we are so far behind the eight ball. you may remember we had a thing called the recovery act, $900 billion the president put me in charge of. he would love to go to a state of the union and say, joe will take care of this. sheriff joe got to spend $90 billion in infrastructure out of that package. and we did a great deal of work. but what we did was we found a number of programs that, in fact, were -- for every dollar we spend, we brought four dollars off of the sidelines in private dollars/state dollars. i heard you speaking in the beginning here when i was standing back there that what you have is, it's not that infrastructure is not a republican or democrat thing. republicans used to like infrastructure. in re canal on. at any rate, what happens is, if you want to grow american business and enterprise, you've got to have the most modern

ports, the most modern airports, you have to be able to get product from your factory to the customer quickly. and so there's an overwhelming incentive and a desire in the local areas, as well as among businesses, to want to invest. if they know the federal government is in. and the way i started off with , and i come from the corporate state of america, dupont, delaware. it used to be the eighth largest corporation in the world. it no longer is. but the point is we reduce the corporate tax to 21%. i raise it back to 28% and i think we could get republicans to support that, as well. that raises $740 billion over 10 years. raises $740 billion over 10 years. i have a $1.3 trillion infrastructure plan that breaks out in a whole bunch of ways. there are a number of corporations that are not paying any tax at all. there should be a minimum 15%.

when they report earnings to wall street to keep their stock up, whatever that number is, they have to pay 15% of that, no matter what exemptions they have. a 21%y are paying corporate tax rate across the board, they don't have to pay that. but a minimum 15% is another $420 billion. i know you are looking at me like how will bite in make -- b iden make that happen? republican voters are going, wait a minute, you have this $1.9 trillion tax cut that did not help me a hell of a lot if i am not the top couple percent. a lot of those folks are middle-class and to observe it about social values. i believe the band-aid has been ripped off and people are ready to do rational things. >> would that include the gas tax? fmr. v.p. biden: i think we have

to put in $50 billion off the bat on the gas tax coming from those additional taxes. i have tried this before. we are not going to be able to raise the gas tax. we may be able to index it down the line, but i don't big we can raise the debt -- gas tasks -- gas tax from what it is now. the firstd to do in 50 billion to invest in modernizing those highways, not building new ones. one part we have not talked about is, i think the biggest sector, and i don't want to get him in trouble, mayor garcetti can tell you. more energy, time, wages and lost sitting on the l.a. -- l.a. freeway. if we are able to use the technology that is on the cusp of being able to have, first of all, more transit, we are in a

position where, for example, when i was asked to bill out detroit, ibailout was able to recruit any part of the government. we found out that 60% of the people lived in the city and their jobs are out of town but they did not have automobiles. we put in light rail. it modernized and made a fundamental change in the economic growth in that area. it didn't add more automobiles to the highways. number one. number two, if we take a look at what the president allowed me to do what we did the first part of the recovery act, we came up with -- i am a big rail guide, high-speed rail. if we took what we appropriated money for, including from new york, new jersey and the tunnels that had not been modernized

since 1960, all the way from orlando to tampa, from tallahassee all the way across in the mississippi, these are high-speed rail areas where, you , you get people out of the car into a train and into canher method if you guarantee them they can get there in the same amount of time with the same amount of reliability. we can do that. there's no reason why we should not be able to build what we have talked about, and it could go 220 miles an hour. three curves from washington to new york, you could reduce the travel time. 2,001,000veled over miles on amtrak. that's what the guys on the rail tell me. if you straighten out those few

you could get there in an hour and a half, fundamentally changing every single lane and highway. one lane, 20 million bucks. to the -- do the same thing on railroads and you're talking about 4 million. you mentioned republicans and that there should be bipartisan support in doing the things you are talking about. one of the things republicans say, and donald trump says, -- fmr. v.p. biden: not a republican. you can laugh. republicans and you know he is not the republican party. [laughter] [applause] this eight your father's republican party. >> that's true. one of the things republicans generically say is, one of the

things these don't happen is the regulation is slowing down. they sewed on infrastructure, they make it more expensive. the trump administration has tried to do something. are they right? fmr. v.p. biden: they are right but they had the wrong answer. we fundamentally eliminated and streamlined the ability to get through all of the regulatory requirements that were necessary. you see with happening in the new york airport at laguardia. absolutely. we can streamline significantly without damaging the environment. i will give you a concrete example. when the president asked me to -- anyway, i was asked to put together a cabinet initiative on health care. i turned to one of the major cabinet holders and i said, when will you have your assistant, they said, we will have one by the end of the year. i said, if you don't have one by

march the first, you're fired. me --s, you can't fired fire me. , a lott being facetious of it has to do with the knowledge, if not, you have to find a new answer. you have to make the priority to invest in that piece, whatever that peace is. we can significantly streamline doingtions without everything from the endangered species act, all the way through generating more pollution. we have done that a number of places. i would have somebody in the white house at one job. just one. doing nothing but streamlining projects, but doing within the context of having people who know what they are talking about in terms of the environment. most of it is just bureaucratic delay. >> you mention setting priorities. trains,talked about new

and new projects that can be willed faster if we streamline regulations. in yet, most jobs infrastructure our maintenance. what a lot of people talked about are the crumbling infrastructure of america. how do you prioritize that? do you fix the crumbling part, or do you just tilled all the shiny new parts? fmr. v.p. biden: you have to do both's i don't think it's either or. for example, if you are talking about our ports, you have to build ports that are ready to handle the ships. but it did not mean you don't have to go back and restore the , at the same time you're increasing the size, scope and capability that takes them off the docks. you have to go out and dreads.

find arease able to you provide for the spoils. the most stuff is the new kind of cranes. the speed at which it happens. access from the highway. and we do that down in savannah, we are doing it in florida. i don't see them as either or. we have to maintain the only what we bring up to snuff that is out there that has not been maintained, but you have new initiatives that are going to be much more capable of sustaining ofgevity without this kind intensive maintenance that has been needed in the past. it's called technology. i am not being a wise guy when i say that. arethe new technologies capable of being able to do so much more.

there is no reason why, at our ports, we don't have solar capacity to make sure we save a lot of energy, create a lot new jobs for people out there, just like here in nevada, go out to techno valley. in highd be investing transfer of that capacity from here to the middle west -- midwest. we have not invested the time, energy or money into deciding how you transmit lean energy. whether it is wind or solar. honest to god, i have not seen that dichotomy. last example, water. water is a big problem. there is a lot of potable water in big trouble. we have to dig up those wooden pipes, that is true. we are new mechanisms able to put in should be much more resilient.

grounded fore been over 40, 50 years. you cannot say i am going to just move without dealing with what's there. we want to ask some questions that were sent to us by readers .nd members of the coalition one of this is a subject that has not come up yet, which is airports. county las vegas, the department of aviation is developing a second airport to serve growing southern nevada. house democrats released in infrastructure framework, which, for the first time in 20 years increases the airport, passenger facility charge and remedies the overcrowding and increasing delays on runways. as president, would you sign a bill to increase the passenger facility charge to modernize infrastructure? fmr. v.p. biden: yes i would. it is 5.4% now. the second piece of this is that

, one of the things that will happen is -- let me give an example. on the east coast, every solitary airport from maine to florida that is in -- that is within 50 miles of the water has fewer people getting on and off aircraft and amtrak every day. let's just get something straight. we continue to subsidize the hundreds of millions of dollars in minnesota. maybe you have to help that. but a lot can change if we look at the transportation in a way that is different than before. a way to deal with it is not just to decide we will continue the same pattern of distribution and modernize it and make it real, but you are going to change the way in which regional airports were. for example, in philadelphia, a big airport. wilmington, delaware has a large

airport that is mostly private. what happens is, that is a -- that is where air force one lands end takes off. i always that that was a good omen. , we should beide figuring out a way in which we deal with roots. why do we have the roots we have now in our major airports that are overcrowded? because, not over my house. i get that. so you will be able to redirect, and it's beyond my pay grade to know how to do it, but we should be able to integrate regional airports that are already there among the big regional airports to deal with the capacity and the overload. but i would sign the bill that raises that tax. knoxville has a question that has to do with what really becomes the democratsbetween

desire to bring green jobs and green agendas to the table, but still maintain, in many ways, the old infrastructure of fossil fuels. his question is, would you tollser national polls -- to reduce congestion in place -- pay for maintenance? or anything like that to try to get some cars off the road? fmr. v.p. biden: you have to change the transportation structure, the network, the structure. had running through every major city a commuter line that was in the middle of a four lane highway going in and out of the city, you could radically reduce the number of people that are on

that highway. save billions of dollars in lost wages. you would say billions of gallons of gasoline over time, but this suggests that what we have to do is keep the exact same system network as we have it. i wish we had a big board up here that we could actually draw on the board the means by which b. get from point a to point it's got a change and it has to change. when i did the recovery act, we got -- for example -- we had great problems in south carolina and they had problems with the port and maintained the port. it turns out a significant portion of the things that get shipped out of the port get shipped to them from the midwest on railroads, but the rail load -- railroad system was backwards and not working well.

intook money, we invested that and the port of baltimore. we cap a lot of factories in ohio opened. we get from the products to the factories to the port by doing some imaginative stuff, taking and reconnecting railroad systems that used to exist but have fallen apart. is,i guess what i am saying i think we keep thinking this. how do you maintain the old structure? the 28 or 20 ninth most modern infrastructure in the world, the united states of america? you will open up a new factory. you will open up in hong kong or baltimore? will you open in san francisco or another place that invested billions of dollars from getting a factory to ship it out? i think we have to think of it in a different way.

it does not mean you ignore the past or walk away from it, but it means that instead of investing billions of dollars in things that no longer are viewed as the best way to get from point a to point b, whether it is you are a product, you can do it. when you rebuild it you can do it so it's greener. there is no rationale to build any new infrastructure that is not green. the billion $300 trillion that i call for over 10 years in my 100 millionre plan, goes into modernizing our schools. how many of you live in school districts were you are worried your kid will drink water out of the fountains or has us best dose? or be have taken away tax credit comes blowing through your windows. you aren't using more energy than you need to use.

it makes sense. we can save a lot of money. we can create 6 million new union jobs. [applause] fmr. v.p. biden: everything of thing in my administration with infrastructure job will be -- as bacon. i really mean it. that generates economic growth within community. they build, this day, they build better homes. they go out and invest more money. fight in that $90 billion that i was in charge of, making sure we got it out. i insisted every single dollar had to be davis-bacon. we think too small. we think in terms of when you spend money, you increase salaries, you provide good paying jobs that paid 50-60

dollars an hour, plus benefits. that somehow that hurts everybody. wealthier, thes middle classes able to sustain itself while the poor has a way up. that it's what it's about. nobody has never shown me a model to suggest, that when you ife hard-working people -- all of a sudden every ironworker in america went on strike for every ibw member goes on strike and quits for six months, or every wall street banker quits. [laughter] >> i am not -- fmr. v.p. biden: i am not being facetious, think about it, it would come to a screeching halt. business china takeover apprenticeship programs, -- business is trying to takeover apprenticeship programs, not on my watch. [applause] got us off to a great

start. your passion for the subject is really appreciated. i can't get those millions of miles on amtrak out of my head. there was anen: accident and my family and i started to go home every night thinking i would only stay for six months. 250 miles aade over day. andve made thousands thousands of roundtrips to go home. that is the only reason it went up. i got criticized for them naming the train station. they should name the whole damn line after you. [laughter] [applause] >> c-span campaign 2020 bus team

is traveling across the country, asking voters what issues should presidential candidates address? >> this election, the most important issue for me is civil rights and civil liberties, like voting rights, reproductive rights, and reproductive freedoms. these rights are more important now than ever because we're seeing them being violated left and right. they're definitely as important as every other issue. >> issue most important to me right now is the fact that veterans don't have housing. i feel as though new hampshire should do more for its veterans, and right now, veterans have to leave and either go to vermont or they need to go to massachusetts in order to get the services that they need. i don't think that that is appropriate. these people make a sacrifice for our country and they should be able to have the services when they come home. >> i'm interested in having

their candidates focus on actionable environmental policies, like the paris accord, what they are going to do with carbon emissions, and renewables. >> and the most important thing to me about this campaign is the truth. we need to work on gun violence. we need to work on health care. we need to work on college education. we have a lot of things to work on. but when the senate votes openly and against the truth, in a partisan manner, it's time for us to return to our roots, face facts, listen to witnesses. it's just time to face the truth and move forward. and we can't do that if we don't open our eyes and. tension. -- and pay attention. >> one of the most important issues is education, including the current cost of education for postgraduate and graduate work. the concerning legislation coming out of the trump administration in regards

to secondary ed and k-12. they haven't done a lot of good for teachers, as a teacher, i've seen it. for me, that's number one and that's why i'm voting. >> voices from the road on c-span. >> monday night on the communicators, from the state of lle net conference, we' discuss technology and the internet. watch the communicators monday night at 8:00 eastern on c-span two. >> yesterday, democratic presidential candidate mike bloomberg made his fifth campaign stop in virginia. he spoke with voters at an event in richmond ahead of the super tuesday chimeric contests. [applause]