State of the Union Highlights

If you watched the State of the Union last night, you heard President Biden use this rallying cry to talk about his economic agenda:

“I ran for President to fundamentally change things … To build an economy from the bottom up and the middle out, not from the top down. Because when the middle class does well, the poor have a ladder up and the wealthy still do very well. We all do well.”

Sound familiar? Our founder Nick Hanauer has been championing that same middle-out slogan for years. Civic Action was founded with the ambitious goal to tear down the mainstream acceptance of trickle-down economics and rebuild an economy that works for everyone – not just the very rich. And, we celebrated major progress toward our shared goal at the State of the Union last night.

Over the last two years, President Biden has worked to invest in the middle class and ensure that no one in our economy gets left behind. As a result, the US added over 12 million jobs in just the first two years of his Presidency (more than any other President in American history). His administration has created hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs and just passed the CHIPS Act to further invest in American manufacturing. Plus, he signed a once-in-a-generation infrastructure package into law.

And he did all of this without help from the majority of Republicans. Time and again, the GOP has voted against infrastructure projects and economic policies that will benefit their constituents. To all the naysayers who claim to disagree with his agenda, Biden has one simple message: “I’ll see you at the ground-breaking.”

To understand just how revolutionary Biden’s “middle-out” policies truly are, we have to go back about 50 years: Since the Reagan administration, politicians on both sides of the aisle have let the super-rich earn millions off of the backs of their workers while only paying them a few dollars an hour – and they’ve passed tax codes that allow corporations to pay next to nothing in taxes. But now, we have a president who is finally prioritizing the vast majority of Americans over zillionaires.

“Big corporations aren’t just taking advantage of the tax code,” President Biden explained last night, “They’re taking advantage of you, the American consumer.”

President Biden’s middle-out policies aren’t just a sympathy card (and certainly not a hand out) to those who have been left behind and forgotten by the trickle-down economic agenda. Each investment in the middle and working classes gives workers the opportunity to build better lives for themselves and their children.

And, this is far from the end of Biden’s economic agenda. Last night, President Biden introduced a new billionaire tax that would require corporations and super-rich individuals to pay their fair share, and he proposed that we quadruple the tax on stock buybacks to ensure that CEO’s invest in their employees and not their personal pocketbooks (to specify that taxing buybacks would benefit everyday Americans). He also called on Congress to renew the Child Tax Credit to decrease child poverty and pass antitrust enforcement to prevent big online platforms from giving their own products an unfair advantage.

President Biden added, “And by the way, when we do all of these things, we increase productivity. We increase economic growth.” We couldn’t agree more.

Investing in the middle and working classes is the best way to strengthen our economy. When more people have money in their pockets to spend in their local economies, business booms and jobs are created. It’s a virtuous cycle that strengthens the economy for everyone. After two years of Biden’s middle-out policies, there’s no doubt that the state of our union is stronger than it was during 50 years of trickle-down dominance.

Thanks for reading, 

Team Civic Action