The House minority leader over the weekend slammed Republicans for using the term “class warfare” as a criticism of the administration's policies, calling it a “defense” for their position.
Republicans have charged that President Obama’s plan to tax the wealthy in order to pay for his deficit-reduction plan is the administration engaging in class warfare. The GOP has indicated resistance to taxing the wealthy, saying it would unfairly punish job creators.
“Am I missing something here?” Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) asked Sunday at the 2011 New Yorker Festival. “That is an illegitimate charge in a country that has life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness in its founding documents.”
Pelosi said she has told Democrats heading into deficit-reduction negotiations on the new congressional supercommittee to keep in mind "the fact that 15 percent of American people live in poverty" as they seek to reach a deal by Thanksgiving.
She also responded to “one of the candidates for president who shall remain nameless,” quoting former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who said this summer while campaigning in Iowa that “corporations are people, too.”
“I have news for him: Workers are people, too,” Pelosi said.
“We reward success. I’ve got these pearl earrings,” she joked. “God bless [corporations] for their success, God bless the shareholders who participate in that success. But let’s not forget the workers who contributed to that success. And as long as productivity and wages continue to go like that — productivity up, wages not rising in any relation to productivity — we’re going to have an erosion of the middle class. We’re going to have people slipping down from it. Most people in the country, no matter how poor they are, believe they are in the middle class, and that’s where they want to be, and we have to honor that aspiration.”
Romney has charged that the president's policies have hurt the middle “80 to 90 percent” of taxpayers, and pledged his prospective presidential policies would help strengthen it. The prospective White House candidate, who proposes cutting the corporate tax rate, stood firm on his comment regarding corporations, dismissing Obama’s “1960s ‘We don't like companies’ shtick.”
Pelosi quoted billionaire Warren Buffett, who has lately become the face of big business support for Democrats. “Actually, there’s been class warfare going on for the last 20 years, and my class has won. We’re the ones that have gotten our tax rates reduced dramatically,” Buffett said last week on CNN.
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