Vice President Joe Biden straightforwardly declared in an interview that aired Tuesday that the inability of the Obama administration and its predecessors to raise U.S. income marks a failure of the political system, placing blame on major disasters and wars that have diverted attention away from the economy.
“I feel that is a failure,” Biden said of weak income growth when asked about it in a CNBC interview onboard an Amtrak train between Washington and Delaware.
Biden was first elected to the Senate in 1973. Since then, middle-class incomes have grown slower than they did in the post-war period, and most recently have yet to recover fully from the financial crisis, according to Congressional Budget Office data.
Biden, however, rejected the idea that he and President Obama have played “small ball” in terms of economic policy, explaining that they have had to manage “about eight atom bombs dropped on our desk.” Among those, he suggested, were the economic and diplomatic crises the administration has had to handle.
The vice president also defended the Obama administration’s long, unsuccessful push to tax “carried interest” earned by some investment managers at the rate of ordinary income, rather than at the lower rate on capital gains.
Contrary to one critic in the industry who suggested that taxing carried interest at ordinary rates was like Hitler invading Poland, Biden said that “it’s like us liberating death camps.” There is no justification for that feature of the tax code, Biden argued, but Obama has failed to change it because of all the emergencies he has had to address.
A number of presidential candidates, including both Democrats and Republican front-runner Donald Trump, have said that they would favor taxing carried interest at the same rate as ordinary rates.
