After having a friendly chat on the tarmac at LaCrosse Regional Airport with Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, President Obama made fun of the GOP field jockeying to succeed him and ripped into Walker’s actions as governor.
“You all have enough for an actual Hunger Games,” Obama said about the large Republican presidential field. “That is an interesting bunch,” he quipped before explaining why trickle-down economics doesn’t work.
He said that many of the contenders are proposing ideas that they say would benefit the middle class. “Tammy, Ron, me — we were talking about the middle class before it was cool,” he said referring to Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin and Rep. Ron Kind — whose district encompasses LaCrosse — who were in the audience at the University of Wisconsin-LaCrosse auditorium. “We were talking about it before the polls” said politicians “should be talking about it,” he added.
The huge GOP presidential field keeps “coming up with the same old trickle-down, you’re-on-your-own economics,” he said.
“I know some of [the candidates] well; they are good people,” Obama said. “It’s just that their ideas are bad. But “we are one country; we are all on one team; we are all one American family,” he said before comparing the nation to a family Thanksgiving dinner.
“We’re at Thanksgiving and Uncle Harry starts saying something and you say ‘Uncle Harry, that makes no sense at all,” Obama joked. “You still love him; he’s still a member of your family, but you gotta correct him. You don’t want to put him in charge of stuff.”
“That’s all I’m saying,” Obama trailed off, chuckling before apologizing to any actual uncle Harrys in the audience at the University of Wisconsin-LaCrosse auditorium.
Every Republican presidential candidate in Congress “has supported cutting taxes for folks at the top while slashing investments in education; I know that sounds familiar,” Obama said, aiming directly at Walker’s education budget cuts.
Wisconsinites have seen their statewide fair-pay law repealed and their right to organize and bargain collectively attacked, Obama said. And the state has endured education-spending cuts while at the same time corporations and the wealthy have reaped “hundreds of millions” in tax cuts. “So that’s what’s been going on here,” he summarized. “What happens when you go try middle-class economics?”
“Just across the river,” he paused while the crowd cheered enthusiastically, “it’s a pretty interesting experiment,” he said about Minnesota, which is separated from LaCrosse by the Mississippi River.
Minnesota raised taxes on the top two percent of wage earners; invested in all-day kindergarten and financial aid for college students; passed an equal pay law; increased the minimum wage; expanded Medicaid through the Affordable Care Act; and protected workers’ rights to bargain and organize, he said.
“According to the Republican theory, all those steps would have been bad for the economy,” Obama said, noting that Minnesota unemployment rate is lower than Wisconsin’s and its median income is $9,000 higher.
“Wisconsin is this extraordinary state filled with extraordinary people,” Obama said. But if a state follows GOP policies “then, it’s not going to work,” he said to eager applause. “We need better policies because the bottom line is top-down economics doesn’t work; middle-class economics works.”
