The yawning chasm between the wealthy and the rest of America is the defining issue of our time, President Barack Obama told an applauding crowd at the Osawatomie high school yesterday.
Calling it a “make or break moment for the middle class,” President Obama said America works best when Americans work together and called for a unified effort to restore the country’s manufacturing strength.
He said greater controls on the big financial institutions were needed and predicted a return to the days when college students took degrees in engineering and technology instead of banking and finance.
Declaring that America is on the way back up, he said the tens of thousands of construction workers thrown out of work when the housing bubble burst should have been put to work building roads, laying cable for high-speed Internet, connecting the country with bullet trains and making things that will be sold around the world stamped with “those three proud words, Made in America.”
The president didn’t pass up the opportunity to call for an extension of the lower payroll tax put into effect to stimulate the economy. A failure to do so by the end of the year would amount to a $1,000 tax increase on those earning $50,000 a year and would devastate the economy because it would reduce spending power just as consumer buying normally hits its peak.
The president is also asking for an extension of unemployment benefits due to expire Dec. 31.
TUESDAY’S SPEECH contrasted the economic prescriptions offered by the two parties. The Republican philosophy is simple, he said. They believe we are better off when everyone is left to fend for themselves and plays by their own rules. They also believe keeping the taxes on the rich low — and they are the lowest they have been in over 50 years — creates more wealth which will then trickle down to the middle and lower classes and boost the economy.
“Well,” he said, “I’m here to tell you they are wrong. The only thing wrong with that theory is that it doesn’t work. It never has worked.”
The president used recent history to make his point. When Bill Clinton took office one of this first acts was to raise taxes, despite warnings that doing so would throw the country back into recession. In the next decade, the economy created about 23 million new jobs and higher tax income brought the federal budget into balance, creating the first surplus since the Eisenhower administration.
The Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 — the largest in history — were followed by the lowest number of new jobs created in any decade since the Great Depression, a greater gap between rich and poor and a monstrous increase in the federal deficit.
Slashing taxes didn’t stimulate the economy. The theory doesn’t work, the president repeated.
OBAMA’S OSAWATOMIE speech gave the country a preview of what will almost certainly be his primary re-election theme: give everyone a shot at earning a decent living; ask everyone to pay their fair share of the cost of running the country. And don’t — in the name of good sense — continue to fork over an ever-growing portion of the nation’s wealth to the super-rich and expect them to sprinkle it around to make everything hunky-dory for the masses.
It was a good speech, masterfully delivered, and well received in conservative, Republican, Osawatomie.
But the same text delivered by a high school speech student would would also be persuasive. The president has the facts on his side.
He also has a definition of Americanism which emphasizes working together, sharing burdens, watching out for the other guy and putting the common good first that stands in stark contrast to the survival of the fittest individualism that so often characterizes opposition rhetoric.
Sometimes softies win.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
