President Biden responded to Speaker McCarthy by painting the Republican demand for cuts as pushing the country toward a default that would hurt working people.
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President Biden said while speaking at a union hall in Maryland:
You and the American people should know about the competing economic visions of the country that are really at stake right now. I’m here in this union hall with you. Just two days ago, the Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy went to Wall Street to describe the MAGA economic vision for America. And it is very clear they’ve laid it out. I know when I was telling you what was going to happen to telling folks they looked at me like that can’t happen. Well, guess what it’s trying to happen now.
Massive cuts in programs you count on massive benefits protected for those top. A lot of you know, all the tax cuts go to the top. None of the bottom. The threat of defaulting on America’s debt for the first time in 230 years, we’ve never ever default on the debt. It would destroy this economy. And who do you think will hurt the most? You, hard working people, the middle class the neighborhoods I got raised in not the super wealthy and the powerful but working folks.
President Biden defined McCarthy and the Republican debt limit bill before they have released it. Biden used everything that McCarthy has done from going to Wall Street to calling for cuts to spending programs to define the conversation as the interests of the rich versus the interests of working people.
Kevin McCarthy’s gift to the rich is dead on arrival in the Senate, but Biden just gave the Speaker a new headache by defining the debt limit not in terms of fiscal policy but by making McCarthy look like a puppet of the rich and right-wing extremists.