President Barack Obama concedes in a new Economist interview that the economic plight of middle-class and working-class American families has not improved under his leadership.
“Middle-class and working-class families are stuck,” Obama admitted. “Their wages and incomes are stagnant. They’ve been stagnant for almost two decades now. This is not a phenomenon unique to the United States, but it is global.”
The solution, Obama said, is redistribution of wealth.
“And this to me is the big challenge: How do we preserve the incredible dynamism of the capitalist system while making sure that the distribution of wealth and incomes and goods and services in that system is broadly based, is widely spread?”
Oddly, despite Obama’s bleak middle-class economic confession, earlier in the interview he appeared to contradict himself by heralding his economic leadership.
“Since I have come into office, there’s almost no economic metric by which you couldn’t say that the U.S. economy is better and that corporate bottom lines are better,” said Obama. “None.”
Obama added: “I think you’d have to say that we’ve managed the economy pretty well and business has done okay.”