Rick Allen: “just quickly, the thing that strikes me, that is astonishing to me is the median household income in this country is…”

“just quickly, the thing that strikes me, that is astonishing to me is the median household income in this country is something like $48,000, $49,000. Half of the households, or less than half of the households earn more. We have a deficit of roughly $427 billion projected for this year. That is more than $1 billion a day that we are borrowing, a lot of it from Chinese and Japanese banks. Yet, $89 billion will be enjoyed by households earning over $350,000 this year, next year, the year after that, the year after that; $89 billion that they did not have in the prosperous 1990s because of the tax cuts that the Republicans passed for the wealthiest people in the country, and they are going to do anything to protect those tax cuts. So what they are doing is they are cutting aid for small businesses, they are cutting vocational education, they reduce funding for adult education, they reduce funding for the Small Business Administration to protect tax cuts for the wealthiest people in the country. It is hard to see how that will provide a stronger and more competitive economy, and it certainly will not provide broader prosperity because that, in my view, is the second goal we ought to have here. We ought to be trying to make sure that opportunity in this country; the chance, if you work hard and play by the rules, to have a reasonable opportunity for a reasonable level of prosperity. That is missing in this budget. The middle class in this budget takes it on the chin.…”