In an another attempt to cast himself as FDR, President Obama compared Republicans to President Herbert Hoover and criticized them for “giving tax cuts to people who don’t need them.”
Obama told an audience at a Hawaii campaign event that the country can’t “just hand out more tax cuts to people who don’t need them, let companies play by their own rules without any restriction, and we just hope somehow that the success of the wealthiest few translates in the prosperity for everybody else.”
“It doesn’t work. It didn’t work for Herbert Hoover, when it was called trickle-down economics during the Depression,” Obama said, associating low tax policies with Hoover, rather than the more successful — and more popular — proponent, Ronald Reagan. “It didn’t work between 2000 and 2008, and it won’t work today. And the reason it won’t work is because we are not a country that is built on survival of the fittest.”
Obama made these remarks in the course of arguing that “The very core of what this country stands for is on the line [in the 2012 election].” He implied that a Republican victory would threaten “the basic promise that no matter who you are or where you come from, what you look like, that you can make it in America if you try — that vision is on the line.”
