At the “Politics & Eggs” event in New Hampshire on March 12th, former Texas Gov. Rick Perry discussed wage stagnation:
“The President may be satisfied with 2% economic growth. I’m not. For the first time in American history, a generation of leaders are on the verge of breaking the social compact, if you will, with the next generation. That is that we leave a better country for them, than what we found ourselves. Fewer of us believe in the American dream now than in the last twenty years. For middle class Americans, opportunity and security have been replaced by worry and anxiety. Out of pocket healthcare costs, housing, college tuition, all of them have gone up faster than wages have. Student debt is at an all-time high, and this has to change. It’s time to restore hope and opportunity to middle class America.
We can start with our tax code. We’ve got the highest corporate tax rate in the western world. And that doesn’t just hurt companies, it also hurts the American worker. Economists will tell you that if you cut the corporate tax rate by 10 percent, it will lift the wages for the middle class worker by about 5 or 10 percent. That’s what we need to be focused on, helping raise those workers’ wages. We need more than just corporate tax reform to help the workers; we also need to simplify the tax code to reduce that burden on all individuals.
We also need to tackle the inequities that are caused by this Dodd-Frank regulation. Dodd-Frank didn’t eliminate ‘too big to fail.’ As a matter of fact it codified it. It gives preferential treatment to these large institutions on Wall Street, while restricting access to funds for Main Street. You see the cost of legal compliance is now overwhelming. Our community banks—and those of you who come from small communities know that those community banks may be the only institutions, particularly in our rural areas to fund economic development there. They happen to provide half of the small business loans in this country.”
Perry’s entire appearance can be viewed below. He discusses middle class economics at the 11:10 minute mark:
