In the first speech since he and his team formally rolled out his expected campaign for another term, President Joe Biden outlined some of the sweeping success seen by his administration and lambasted the prospect of implementing some of the more draconian moves threatened in GOP policy proposals.
Throughout his remarks, he was repeatedly met by cheers and supportive chants from the crowd. “Let’s go Joe!” they said. For the Tuesday speech, Biden was speaking to attendees at a conference of the union association known as North America’s Building Trades Union, or NABTU for short. He focused in large part on some of the many infrastructure projects and domestic economic development he and his administration have helped boost, including with the bipartisan deal on infrastructure spending he signed into law last year, supporting work done in substantial part by union workers like those cheering for him on Tuesday afternoon. Biden also touted the Democratic bill known as the Inflation Reduction Act, which contained measures like draw-downs in price for healthcare needs and tax perks for renewable energy development and use.
More generally, he also criticized the idea of so-called trickle-down economics, which involves the notion that economic support for those situated higher in the economy will translate into a boost for those with less income. Whether because of company stock buybacks or bloated corporate salaries, that’s just not a thing, even though not even all Democrats have agreed on the focus. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.), who was a Democrat at the time, helped ensure during negotiations around the Inflation Reduction Act that favorable tax provisions for additional income earned by some in private equity investment were preserved.
There is currently an increasingly urgent need for action to address the debt ceiling, which concerns actions the federal government can take to address spending to which the government already agreed. House Republicans are pushing legislation that would link an increase in the debt ceiling to forced declines in spending, taking the total level of discretionary spending back to 2022 levels while evidently maintaining defense expenditures, meaning the general cuts they want would have to come from basically everything else.
“And meanwhile, guess what my MAGA Republican friends in Congress are up to?” Biden asked attendees. “The Speaker of the House went to Wall Street last week to propose huge cuts in important programs that cut all discretionary funding by 22 percent, including ones I’ve just named — programs millions of working- and middle-class Americans count on. At the same time, he and his MAGA Republican colleagues are pushing some tax giveaways for the wealthiest Americans and biggest corporations. They’d rather see kids and seniors struggle with what they need, people on Medicaid lose their healthcare, veterans lose access to doctor’s visits — and that’s part of it, by the way; not a joke — than cut subsidies to Big Oil that made $200 billion, and Big Pharma and the wealthiest corporations.”
Watch below:
