Portside

'The vision of the tea party is clear. This economy is doing well. If most Americans are not doing well, it is because they are lazy malcontents. Corporate profits are soaring, Wall Street is all smiles, the rich are getting richer so those who aren’t on one of those trains have only themselves to blame. We just need to continue on the path we are on: smaller and smaller government. We had an election in 2012 when Mitt Romney got to deliver that vision—and he lost.

'President Obama must return to leading. There needs to be a clear vision of where America is headed. There has to be clear acknowledgement that this path is failing us. His speech on Thursday did not do that. Cutting people off from food—as the tea party-led House did with its cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program that also would cut more than 200,000 children from reduced price school lunches—in service to helping shrink the government to make the world safer for corporate profits and tax-free lives for the rich is not measuring America's success by our children’s well-being. Threatening the future of Social Security and Medicaid benefits for our children who currently have the lowest level of employment of any American generation, in jobs that pay poorly and provide no retirement benefits, in the name of smaller government and lower taxes for the rich is not a vision of a society that measures its success based on the well-being of its children. Continuing to fight against funding for teachers to replace the hundreds of thousands lost to our children’s classrooms, overcrowding their classrooms and cutting our investment in our children’s education so the government can be smaller and the rich richer is not creating a society focused on the well-being of our children. Letting our infrastructure collapse, so our children will be faced with even higher bills to fix our roads, update our water and sewer systems and keep our ports operable, so the rich can pay fewer taxes, is not putting the welfare of our children first.'