RSSObama rips ‘tax-cut fairy dust’
President Barack Obama speaks to an overflow crowd at Grand Junction High School on Thursday. Obama delivered a scathing critique of his Republican opponents’ ideas. “They’ve tried to sell this whole trickle-down, tax-cut fairy dust before. It did not work then; it won’t work now,” he said.
Barack Obama is running for a second term because he has a plan to continue helping the country recover from the recession, the president told a screaming Grand Junction crowd on Wednesday.
And only by electing him to another four-year term in office, instead of Republican Mitt Romney, will the nation recover, Obama told more than 2,400 people at Grand Junction High School.
Likening Romney’s ideas for economic recovery to “fairy dust” and “a whole different kind of gymnastics,” Obama said Romney and the Republicans’ recovery plans are what got the nation into the recession to begin with.
“What is standing in our way is our politics,” Obama said. “We’ve got a bunch of folks in Washington who think the only way is their way, and think the only way to go forward is to go right back to the same policies that got us in this mess in the first place.”
Obama said Romney plans to cut taxes for the very wealthy in hopes that it will create jobs for the middle-class, trim the federal budget by $5 trillion and eliminate government regulations across the board.
The president said all of those things have been tried before and didn’t work.
“You get rid of regulations and you cut taxes for wealthy Americans and somehow jobs and prosperity will rain down on all of us,” he said. “They’ve tried to sell this whole trickle-down, tax-cut fairy dust before. It did not work then; it won’t work now. It’s not a plan to create jobs. It’s not a plan to lower the deficit. It’s not a plan to move our economy forward. It’s not a plan to build the middle class.”
The Grand Junction stop was part of a two-day campaign tour of the state. It began with a rally in Denver and will end today with events in Pueblo and Colorado Springs.
At the Denver event Wednesday morning, the president focused on women voters, saying his health care bill that even he now calls Obamacare immediately helped them.
He repeated some of those same comments in Grand Junction.
“I don’t think it makes sense for us to take away control that women have over their own health care decisions,” he said.
Republican National Committee Chairwoman Sharon Day focused on that aspect, saying Obama’s record with women hasn’t been a good one.
“Today, unemployment among women is higher than when President Obama took office,” she said in a statement. “More women are out of work in the Obama economy, and the few jobs that are created go disproportionately to men.”
The warmup to Obama’s speech was a short one. While Interior Secretary and former Colorado Senator Ken Salazar was at the event, the only elected official to address the crowd was U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colorado.
“When President Obama took office, things were really tough,” Bennet said. “Things were really tough in Grand Junction, things were tough in Mesa County, things were tough all over the state of Colorado. We were losing 250,000 jobs a month.
“We have had 29 consecutive months of job growth in this country. We have so much more work to do and that’s why we need to make sure we deliver Colorado to Barack Obama in November.”
The president later was introduced by Grand Junction resident DeAnne Stanberry, a recent nursing student graduate who got the crowd yelling “four more years,” which was reminiscent of the same chant supporters of President George W. Bush shouted during his 2004 re-election.
The president ended the event with a plea to help him win Colorado, one of nine swing states in the nation.
“If you believe that trying what we’ve already tried and didn’t work is worth trying again, if you believe it’s OK to cut taxes for folks who are doing really well, ask folks who are struggling to do more ... that’s your choice,” he said. “But ... if you believe we’re on the right track, if you think like I do that we’ve come too far to turn back now, then I’m going to need you, Colorado.”
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