Acknowledging that most Americans are suffering slow income growth, President Obama said Thursday that boosting the middle class “is going to be the central challenge of our time.”
“We have to make our economy work for every working American,” Obama said at an address at Northwestern University in Chicago. “Every policy I pursue is aimed at answering that challenge.”
The president used a similar phrase – “the defining challenge of our time” — in December, in a speech on inequality in which he warned that “the combined trends of increased inequality and decreasing mobility pose a fundamental threat to the American Dream, our way of life, and what we stand for around the globe.”
On Thursday, however, Obama did not use the word “inequality,” a term he has shied away from this year.
Instead, he touted the progress the country has made in recovering from the 2008 financial crisis and focused on a number of policy proposals to boost the middle class that he said created a “distinct choice” from Republican ideas.
“I am not on the ballot this fall. Michelle’s pretty happy about that,” Obama said, “But make no mistake: these policies are on the ballot. Every single one of them.”
Those included a laundry list of the administration’s priorities, including infrastructure spending, investments in clean energy sources, expanding access to preschool, raising the minimum wage and immigration reform.
Obama made the case that his own economic stewardship has been strong, saying the recovery “has been steady and it has been real.”
“It is indisputable that our economy is stronger today than it was when I took office. By every economic measure, we are better off now than we were when I took office,” he said.
But he did acknowledge that “millions of Americans don’t yet feel enough of the benefits of a growing economy where it matters most – in their own lives,” noting that “the typical family isn’t bringing home any more than it did in 1997.”
