Gas prices are hovering around $2 a gallon. Unemployment applications are at the lowest point since October. The stock market is booming.
But Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Massachusetts, gave a fiery keynote address at the AFL-CIO’s National Summit on Raising Wages conference Wednesday morning, where she blasted leaders of both parties for buying into “trickle-down policies.”
While she doesn’t argue the economy is improving, she argues it isn’t trickling down to everyone.
“But the overall picture doesn’t tell us much about what’s happening at ground level to tens of millions of Americans,” she said, according to the Washington Post. “Despite these cheery numbers, America’s middle class is in deep trouble.”
The trickle-down experiment that began in the Reagan years failed America’s middle class, Warren said, according to Politico. Pretty much the whole Republican Party, and if we’re going to be honest, too many Democrats, are overly cozy with the financial industry and make decisions that benefit the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans while leaving others to struggle, she said. Over the past 32 years, she added, every penny of America’s economic growth has benefited the top 10 percent of earners, while the bottom 90 percent has been squeezed.
Warren also said “democracy does not work when congressmen and regulators bow down to Wall Street’s political power,” and that politicians need to be reminded they don’t work for big banks, but instead, they work for the American people.
Warren’s speech came on the same day President Barack Obama is giving a speech at a Ford Motor Co. assembly plant in Michigan touting the bailout of the U.S. auto industry.
Via Washington Post, Politico
