There's a simple proposition that I've always believed in and taught by my father. Given half a chance, ordinary people can do extraordinary things. But here's the problem: in today's America, the rich are getting richer. Working people are paying the price. It didn't just happen overnight. Even before the pandemic, the wealthy were doing very well, and everyone else was falling further behind. If you're a billionaire, you have more wealth now than you did before the pandemic. If you're like almost one-third of the adults with children, you're struggling to pay for the food you feed your family and know it needs. Under the prior administration, the big drug companies got giant tax cuts, while working Americans cut their prescription pills in half to make sure they can last a month. If you're a teacher or a firefighter, you pay a higher percentage of your income tax than many of the biggest corporations or billionaire investors do right now. Enough. It's time the wealthy start to pay their fair share -- and the key word is fair because it isn't about punishment. It's about fairness. That's why my Build Back Better agenda will level the playing field by rewarding work, not just wealth. We're going to put money directly into the pockets of American workers. How? By lowering the cost of child care and eldercare. By making universal preschool a reality. By lowering the cost of health care premiums for millions of Americans. By expanding Medicare coverage to include dental, vision, and hearing. By expanding the child tax credit and earned income tax credit. Altogether, these add up to thousands of dollars in savings each year for working families. To me, this is the same thing as a giant middle-class tax cut -- one of the biggest in history. Everything in my plan is paid for. How? By asking big corporations, the wealthiest Americans to begin to finally start paying their fair share. The days of the biggest most profitable corporations paying zero in federal tax need to end. My plan will do one more thing. It will create millions of good-paying union jobs by dealing with the existential threat of climate change. There is simply no more time to waste. You see it every day, and as we pull out of this pandemic, we have a fundamental choice to make: are we just going to go back to the way things were, with the rich getting richer, and working people being cut out of the deal, or are we going to build a new economy, one from the bottom up in the middle out, not from the top down. I know my answer. The time is now. It's not enough just to build back. Folks, it's time to Build Back Better.
