The middle class has President Obama’s attention.
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Economic growth has stopped benefiting the middle class, at least to the degree it used to. So the Obama administration has tried to craft a response: Redistribution now and education later.
In his State of the Union address on Tuesday, Obama made the middle class one of his top priorities.
“We gather here knowing that there are millions of Americans whose hard work and dedication have not yet been rewarded. Our economy is adding jobs, but too many people still can’t find full- time employment. Corporate profits have skyrocketed to all-time highs, but for more than a decade, wages and incomes have barely budged. It is our generation’s task, then, to reignite the true engine of America’s economic growth: a rising, thriving middle class,” Obama said not long into his speech.
The president challenged Congress “to assist an American middle class squeezed by rising costs and stagnant wages, making clear that he will devote much of his second term to closing the income gap between rich and poor,” wrote The Washington Post’s Scott Wilson.
Jillian Berman, writing for the Huffington Post, said that “Obama painted a picture of a future nation with a growing economy resting on the backs of Americans with an accessible pathway to the middle class.”
Mark Landler of the New York Times wrote that Obama, “seeking to put the prosperity and promise of the middle class at the heart of his second-term agenda, called on Congress on Tuesday night to raise the federal minimum wage to $9 an hour, saying that would lift millions out of poverty and energize the
Christine L. Owens, executive director of the National Employment Law Project, said in a statement, that she applauds the president for putting jobs and the economy front and center, reports UPI.com.
“President Obama’s remarks tonight show he understands that a higher minimum wage is key to getting the economy back on track for working people and the middle class,” Owens said.
But hold up, wait a minute. Can the promises be kept?
It will be hard, The Post’s Jim Tankersley writes.
“There are two kinds of middle-class Americans struggling today,” he says. “There are the people who can’t find work or can’t work as many hours as they’d like. And there are full-time workers who can’t seem to get ahead.”
He goes on: “Obama seems to have embraced an approach pushed by the Harvard economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz: helping more Americans graduate college and go on to high-skilled, higher-paying jobs. It’s a longer-term bet. But as senior administration officials like to say, the problem didn’t start overnight, and it’s not likely to be solved overnight, either.
Giving the official GOP response to Obama’s address, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) also focused on fixing the middle class. “In a 2,500-word address that was a sort of miniature State of the Union address in its own right, Mr. Rubio mentioned the ‘working class’ and the ‘middle class’ 17 times,” the Wall Street Journal reported.
And how would Rubio fix the middle class?
“Economic growth is the best way to help the middle class,” Rubio said. “Unfortunately, our economy actually shrank during the last three months of 2012. But if we can get the economy to grow at just 4 percent a year, it would create middle-class jobs.”
