Biden takes Trump attacks and economics pitch to Milwaukee
December 20, 2023 02:42 PM
President Joe Biden took his reelection tour to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he argued that his economic policies are helping stand up small businesses in minority communities.
Biden’s remarks, delivered at the Wisconsin Black Chamber of Commerce, sought to prop up black small businesses as “the engines and the glue that hold communities together.”
The president claimed that his policies have driven the largest boost in black business ownership in the past 30 years, with 15 million individuals filing applications to start a new small business since he entered office in 2021.
White House officials had told reporters that 14 million small business applications had been filed over the past three years.
“We’re doing it by building the economy from the middle out and the bottom up, not the top down,” Biden continued. “Not a whole lot of trickle-down on my dad’s kitchen table with a top-down economy, but when you increase the middle class, the poor have a shot and the wealthy still do very well. The middle class does well, and we all do well. That’s what we call Bidenomics.”
For the bulk of this past year, the president has focused his reelection pitch around Bidenomics, the summation of his economic priorities, but has begun to shift focus to likely the Republican presidential nominee, former President Donald Trump, and he continued that line of attack on Wednesday.
Biden called his policies “a fundamental break from the trickle-down economics that was supercharged by my predecessor.”
“The guy who thinks we’re polluting the blood of Americans these days. He cut taxes for the wealthy and big corporations, shipped good paying jobs overseas, shrank public investment in infrastructure,” the president added about Trump’s recent rhetoric on immigrants. “Decades of discrimination and trickle-down economics have left communities like this one behind, but today, we’re making sure Milwaukee is coming back and all the way coming back.”
White House officials say that Biden’s policies have doubled black business ownership compared to the levels of the Trump administration and is up 70% in Milwaukee alone.
“Unfortunately, extreme Republicans in Congress have repeatedly tried to dismantle the President’s small business agenda, with every single Republican, including Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson, voting against the American Rescue Plan,” senior administration officials said Tuesday.
Despite Biden’s campaign focus on the economy, the president consistently polls poorly with American voters.
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As of Wednesday, Biden’s economic approval rating sits at 37% in the RealClearPolitics polling aggregate, nearly four points lower than his general approval rating.
You can watch Biden’s remarks in full below.