Joe Biden said pro-union sentiment is not widely shared by fellow elected officials in Washington.
Philadelphia:
President Joe Biden on Saturday appealed to blue-collar workers to support his re-election quest and help force the richest Americans to pay more taxes.
“It’s time for the super-rich to start paying their fair share,” Biden told hundreds of union workers in the industrial state of Pennsylvania.
The campaign rally was sponsored by the AFL-CIO, a union union that represents 12.5 million US workers and which formally endorsed Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris a day earlier.
Biden launched his 2024 re-election bid on April 25, but had not held any major campaign events before Saturday’s rally.
The president made his pitch against a crowded field of Republicans for the party’s nomination, with Donald Trump leading despite facing federal criminal charges that he mishandled US government secrets, his White House He was impeached twice on charges of misconduct during his tenure, and another whirlwind of legal troubles.
Biden made a distinctive populist appeal in Philadelphia, touching on a range of issues aimed at stemming a migration of working-class voters away from the Democratic Party.
Biden said pro-union sentiment is not widely shared by fellow elected officials in Washington.
“There are a lot of politicians in this country who can’t speak the word ‘Union’ and you know I’m not one of them. I’m proud to say the word, I’m proud to be the most pro-Union president in American history” ,” They said.
He described blue-collar workers as the backbone of the economy.
Biden said, “Wall Street didn’t build America. You did.”
He said, “If investment bankers in this country went on strike tomorrow, no one would notice much.” But if union members walk off the job, “the whole country will come to a grinding halt.”
Biden vowed to protect Social Security and other benefit programs to help average Americans.
“When the middle class does well, everyone does well,” he said, adding that reforms are needed to ensure middle class prosperity, including reforming the tax code, which “simply isn’t fair.”
“How can this be fair, when America’s 55 largest corporations pay zero in federal income tax on $40 billion in profits?” He asked.
Biden said the number of American billionaires has grown to nearly 1,000. They pay an average of eight percent federal taxes on their earnings, he said.
“He paid a lower tax rate than school teachers, than firefighters, probably than anyone in this room. It’s time he paid a minimum tax. I don’t mind him being a billionaire.” Just pay your fair share, man.”
Earlier in the day, Biden conducted an aerial tour of a bridge over an Interstate Highway in Philadelphia that collapsed after a tanker truck caught fire last weekend.
He vowed the full support of the federal government in rebuilding the bridge.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)