Former President Obama devastated Trump and the Republicans for blowing a hole in the deficit with tax cuts for the wealthy and trying to pay for it by cutting Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.
Obama said in Gary, Indiana:
So now they’ve had two years of total control in Washington. What have they done with that power? No, it’s not true they haven’t done nothing. They’ve done something. They promised they were going to take on corruption in Washington. Instead, they’ve racked up enough indictments to field a football team. Nobody in my administration got indicted. Which by the way is not that high a bar. They pledged to fight for the little guy. Do you remember that? So what do they do instead? They dole out $1.5 trillion in tax cuts aimed at billionaires and corporations. Don’t boo. Vote. They can’t hear you, but they sure can hear your vote, Indiana. So they cut tax $1.5 trillion. Didn’t even pretend to pay for them. And our deficits, of course, shot up. That’s what happens, right? You spend a whole bunch of money and then suddenly you’re in debt.
Video:
Obama campaigning in Indiana, "They pledged to fight for the little guy. Do you remember that? So what do they do instead? They dole out $1.5 trillion in tax cuts aimed at billionaires and corporations." https://t.co/UOE0CoyPxR pic.twitter.com/oYLU1Wh93E
— Sarah Reese Jones (@PoliticusSarah) November 4, 2018
Now, keep in mind that when we were in the midst of recession, terrible crisis, folks out of work, folks losing their homes, folks lose their pensions, when we were spending money to lift the economy back up and clean up after the mess they had left, they said no, no, no, you can’t spend money helping teachers. You can’t spend money helping working folks. You can’t spend money sitting up early childhood education programs to give kids a good start because that will blow up the deficit. That would be terrible. We can’t do that. That would be fiscally irresponsible. But when it came to giving some tax cuts to folks who didn’t need them, weren’t even asking for them, suddenly, deficits, that’s not a problem.
But it gets worse, because now that they’ve gotten the tax cuts out, now that they gave away all that money to folks who didn’t need it, like me, by the way. It worked out good for me. Now that that’s happened, suddenly you’ve got the Republican leader in Congress, Mitch Mcconnell, who’s saying well, you know, I’m very disturbed by these deficits. To bring the deficits down, we’re going to have to cut programs like Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security. Don’t boo. Vote.
Obama has just been on fire during this campaign. It has been nearly 100 years since the country has seen a former president take on a current president in this manner on the campaign, but these are not normal times, and Donald Trump is not a normal president. Obama is fighting for the future of America, and in the process, he is blistering Trump and his party’s corruption and betrayal of the American people with a credibility that only he can deliver.
It’s now less than two days before the first polls open, and President Obama is fighting hard for America’s better angels.
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Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
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