By Adrianna McGinley
President Obama called on Congress Tuesday to channel the policies of former President Theodore Roosevelt to bring the country out of recession and keep the “American dream” alive for middle-class Americans.
“At the turn of the last century, when a nation of farmers was transitioning to become the world’s industrial giant, we had to decide: would we settle for a country where most of the new railroads and factories were controlled by a few giant monopolies that kept prices high and wages low? Would we allow our citizens and even our children to work ungodly hours in conditions that were unsafe and unsanitary? Would we restrict education to the privileged few? Because some people thought massive inequality and exploitation was just the price of progress,” Obama said during remarks in Osawatomie, Kansas. “Theodore Roosevelt disagreed.”
“He believed then what we know is true today, that the free market is the greatest force for economic progress in human history,” Obama added. “But Roosevelt also knew that the free market has never been a free license to take whatever you want from whoever you can.”
Obama said Roosevelt was called a radical, socialist and communist for his progressive ideas, but reminded his audience that those ideas were what eventually brought the country out of depression. According to Obama, Roosevelt faced the same skepticism that exists today from “a certain crowd in Washington” who claim the market would “take care of everything…if only we cut more regulations and cut more taxes.”
These critics, Obama said, praise the “trickle-down” theory; a theory he believes lacks what the country needs.
“It’s never worked,” he said. “It didn’t work when it was tried in the decade before the Great Depression. It’s not what led to the incredible post-war boom of the 50s and 60s.”
Obama said that a child born into poverty in the years following World War II had a 50 percent chance of reaching the middle class and in 1980 their chance dropped to 40 percent. Today, he said, their chance has fallen to just one in three.
“The idea that those children might not have a chance to climb out of that situation and back into the middle class, no matter how hard they work? That’s inexcusable. It’s wrong. It flies in the face of everything we stand for,” Obama said.
“This isn’t just another political debate. This is the defining issue of our time. This is a make or break moment for the middle class, and all those who are fighting to get into the middle class.”
Obama called on Congress to pass comprehensive, long-term tax reform, consumer protection measures and support for higher education to bring the U.S. back to prosperity.
“In this economy, a higher education is the surest route to the middle class… We shouldn’t be making it harder to afford college, we should be a country where everyone has the chance to go.”
Obama pushed for an extension of the payroll tax and unemployment benefits to aid struggling middle class families immediately but said “we have to rethink our tax system more fundamentally” in the long term.
“We have to ask ourselves: Do we want to make the investments we need in things like education, and research, and high-tech manufacturing? Or do we want to keep in place the tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans in our country? Because we can’t afford to do both. That’s not politics. That’s just math,” Obama said.
The president called out Republicans for continuing to defend the Bush-era tax cuts and criticized his conservative colleagues for refusing to ask millionaires to return to Clinton-era tax rates.
When Clinton proposed tax increases on wealthy Americans, Obama said, there were fears it would “kill jobs and lead to another recession” but instead, nearly 23 million jobs were created and the deficit was eliminated.
“I’m here to reaffirm my deep conviction that we are greater together than we are on our own,” Obama said. “I believe that this country succeeds when everyone gets a fair shot, when everyone does their fair share, and when everyone plays by the same rules. Those aren’t Democratic or Republican values; 1 percent values or 99 percent values. They’re American values, and we have to reclaim them.”