Biden Throw Down with Hillary as he Came Clean on his Class War Rhetoric

It looks like the Veep is ready to play the Huey Long class warrior that President Obama was so effective at in 2012.

"Come on you two, knock it off now."
(Photo credit: Blogs.America.gov)

Parts of Joe Biden’s private speech Friday in Columbia, S.C., a key early primary state for 2016, was spent attacking the Clintons – and a little bit of it came from being fact checked by The Washington Post.

From The Hill:

Biden, a potential 2016 candidate, said the unraveling of middle-class financial security began in "the later years of the Clinton administration," not under George W. Bush, CNN reported Saturday … In recent months, the vice president has focused on revving up liberals on issues of income inequality, as he prepares for a possible run against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, though many Democrats don't think he'd run against her. … One attendee said it was an “Elizabeth Warren-type speech” blasting income inequality.

Biden gave a similar red meat speech at George Washington University last month about income inequality, where he said that when he first became a U.S. Senator in 1973, “The discrepancy between the salary of the average CEO in America and the lowest-paid worker in that company was 22 to 1 … Now, today, the average CEO in America makes 273 times as much as a person working on a line. What happened?”

ThePost pointed out however that during the Clinton administration, the disparity was 400 to 1 for the CEO to lowest paid worker.

 

“A large part of the reason for the growth in the gap during the Clinton presidency is a soaring stock market and the increasing practice of awarding stock options to corporate executives. Recessions — and the subsequent decline in stocks — made those options less valuable, so the disparity declined a bit,” the Post said in correcting Biden.

So “what happened” was economic growth, which there was plenty of during the Clinton years. Biden’s skewed presentation of CEO to lowest paid worker was a clever way to rile a crowd, but it’s in no way the same as saying the rich got richer and the poor got poorer. 

Typically when an economy expands, CEOs get much wealthier than before and in expanding their companies most workers earn more. So a larger gap between a CEO and worker could still mean everyone is doing better, while a smaller gap could indicate an economic downturn, bad for everyone. 

What we’re seeing in the Obama administration – or for 2016, let’s call it the Obama/Biden administration – is only the wealthy doing well enough because they’re insulated from this economic downturn and fewer and fewer opportunities for the poor and middle class.