Former Governor Mike Huckabee blasted President Obama’s negotiation of the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, insisting that it would actually hurt workers instead of helping them.
“I wouldn’t trust this president to negotiate the purchase of a couch off Craigslist, much less a major trade agreement.” Huckabee said during an interview on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily, referring to the trade agreement.
Huckabee pointedly criticized many of his fellow Republican presidential candidates for supporting the Trans-Pacific trade agreement, and touting it as a boost to the American economy. “This is going to be a great deal for the donor class, an extraordinarily lucrative to the people on Wall Street, but it is going to be a gut punch to people on Main Street,” Huckabee said. “I’m not for sucker punch trade.”
The full text of the agreement was posted by the Obama administration this morning.
Huckabee argued that the trade agreement would assist the wealthiest in America but at the expense of the bottom 90 percent of Americans who had been suffering stagnant wages for 40 years.
“If you’re in the very top investor class of the economy, it will be a great boost,” he said, “If you’re in the working class of the economy … this is an incredible threat to the future of the country, a great threat to our way of life.”
He criticized an economic climate that was growing in America, allowing companies to “exploit the labor” of workers – without giving them enough opportunities to grow their future.
Huckabee pointed out that government efforts to cut Social Security and Medicare was just one more sign that politicians were ripping off every day Americans but keep corporate giveaways in the tax code.
“Social Security and Medicare are not welfare payments, people who are on those programs have paid in their money and it wasn’t like government gave them an option, they involuntarily confiscated it from their checks,” he said.