United Liberty

During a recent campaign rally, Vice President Joe Biden made a very honest admission. As you know, Biden is the type of guy who will tell you what’s on mind, many times to the detriment of his boss, President Barack Obama. But during the campaign rally, Biden told supporters that the middle class “has been buried for the last four years”:

Biden made the remark at a campaign rally while arguing that Republicans would raise taxes on the middle class. He said the tax hike would be especially bad given what the middle class has been through over the last four years.

“This is deadly earnest, man. This is deadly earnest,” the vice president said. “How they can justify, how they can justify raising taxes on the middle class that has been buried the last four years — how in Lord’s name can they justify raising their taxes with these tax cuts.”

Sigh. As a general statement, Republicans don’t want to raise taxes, and to say otherwise is just plain false. What they’re trying to do is maintain all current tax rates for all taxpayers. Sure, Republicans have a strong belief that tax cuts are good, but the reasoning in this instance is that increasing taxes — even just on higher-income earners — would hurt the economy. This is something in which Keynesians used to believe.

Mitt Romney’s campaign is, of course, seizing on the remarks, using them to point to the failures of President Obama’s economic agenda. The Hill notes that Biden later changed his comments to say that Republican ticket would take America back to economic policies that “buried” the middle class.

Look, if Biden wants someone to blame for the problems facing the middle class, he need only look in a mirror. With a mountain of regulations and mandates and looming tax hikes, even just for higher-income earners, businesses are scared to make new investments or bring on new workers because of the uncertainty in the economy. We’re nearly four years into President Obama’s term; so what has changed? Economic growth is tepid, job creation isn’t even keeping up with population growth, and our national debt is still growing.

None of this is to say that Romney is going to do a lot to really change the culture in Washington. There is plenty of reason to be skeptical of him. But after four years, what has President Obama done for the middle class — other than make it more difficult to find a job and saddle their children with more debt?