During Wednesday’s big speech, just as President Obama laid into Rep. Ryan’s Medicare reform proposal, Vice President Joe Biden skirmished with the Sandman. Zzzzz.
Obama wasn’t boring, though. He had a theme.
As he saw it, the Republicans’ “pessimistic” vision is of an “America [that] can’t afford to keep the promise we’ve made for our seniors” or “invest in education or clean energy” or fix “our roads” or afford to do all the cool things done by South Korea, Brazil, and China.
He didn’t explain how it might have come to pass that our government became disabled. He barely mentioned previous budgets’ waste — on goofy projects, overpayments, duplicated efforts, and undeclared, never-ending wars. Or how government regulation and subsidy might be the reason many people cannot afford medical insurance.
Or that if the government doesn’t invest in something, it doesn’t mean that private investors aren’t investing.
But he did mention his opposition to “more than $1 trillion in new tax breaks for the wealthy.”
And then came the corker: “In the last decade, the average income of the bottom 90 percent of all working Americans actually declined. The top 1 percent saw their income rise by an average of more than a quarter of a million dollars each. And that’s who needs to pay less taxes?”
Wow. America’s wealthiest merely “saw their incomes rise”? They didn’t actually do something for their gains?
Maybe Obama was napping while others were working.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.