President Barack Obama took some pointed questions on Monday from townhall participants clearly worried about the precarious state of the nation’s economy.
The roughly hour-long event was attended by small business owners, students, union leaders and others, some supporters of Obama, some not. It was held at the Newseum, a museum dedicated to journalism located just blocks from the White House, and was broadcasted live with no commercial interruption by the business news channel CNBC.
Though questions ranged from taxes, to China, to the rise of the Tea Party, the struggling economy was the central focus. Obama used the opportunity to take a swipe at his predecessor in office, telling participants that while recovery has been slow to develop, it will take time to reverse the effects of policies passed under the Bush administration.
“As a consequence of reckless decisions that had been made, the economy was on the verge of collapse. Those same businesses now are profitable; the financial markets are stabilized,” he said. “The only thing that we’ve said is that we’ve got to make sure that we’re not doing some of the same things that we were doing in the past that got into this mess in the first place.”
The president reiterated his desire to see Congress extend a series of tax cuts for the middle class, but said it would be “irresponsible” to continue providing relief to “millionaires and billionaires.”
“I can’t give tax cuts to the top 2 percent of Americans…and lower the deficit at the same time,” he said.
One questioner, a woman who voted for Obama in 2008, told the president she was tired of defending him, and asked whether living off “hot dogs and beans” represented her new “reality.” The president responded that everything is not “where it needs to be,” but assured her that the nation is “moving in the right direction.”
When asked by another participant whether the ‘American Dream’ was dead, the president said “Absolutely not…We are still the country that billions of people in the world look to and aspire to.”
Obama was also asked about his handling of the bank collapse, including a question from an actual Wall Street executive who said he attended Harvard with the president. Obama acknowledged that he has beaten up on some firms since he took office, but justified it by telling the audience that “folks on Main Street feel like Wall Street has beaten up on them.”
The president argued that despite his actions to boost government regulation of the financial sector, he does not begrudge companies that profit, and has been cautious not to stifle the market.
“It’s very hard to find evidence of anything we’ve done that’s designed to squash business as opposed to promote business,” he said. “What I’ve tried to do is just try to be practical.”