NOTE: the following article is satire, not a statement of fact. Treat it as such.
President Joe Biden appeared in Vegas and gave a speech to MGM culinary workers, of all interest groups, during which he bizarrely described the relatively small contingent of workers as America’s “backbone.” It kicked off with the usual sort of Biden nonsense, an obviously made up story, and proceeded into being about economics, which is when the ridiculous comment on America’s backbone came. Beginning, Biden said:
Folks, you know, my dad used to have an expression, for real. He’d say, “You know, a job is about a lot more than a paycheck. It’s about your dignity. It’s about being treated with respect. It’s about making sure that people know what you do matters. It’s about being able to look your kid in the eye and say, ‘Honey, it’s going to be okay,’ and mean it.”I have a reputation that I’m proud of: being the most pro-union president in American history. And there’s a simple reason for that. When unions are doing well, everybody does well. Not a joke. (Applause.) By the way, that’s a fact. I had the Treasury Department do a study: What are the impact of union movement? What’s the impact? The impact is when you do well, everybody does better. Workers that aren’t even members of a union are getting raises because of the things you guys have done and the work you’ve done and organizations.
So, I came to say thank you, thank you, thank you. And we’re just getting started. We’ve got over 260- — 300- — 260,000 jobs — new jobs just here in the state of Nevada. The point is this: I’ve never believed that trickle-down economics is the way to build an economy, meaning that if the very weal- — and, by the way, if the very wealthy do well, that’s good by me, as long as they start paying their taxes. That’s a different issue. But anyway.
But all kidding aside, the idea was the trickle-down economy would work because what would happen is you would have the very wealthy doing well and that would all drop down to the middle-class folks and poor folks. I’ve never believed that. Not a lot dropped on my dad’s kitchen table growing up. So, I’ve always believed that you build the economy from the middle out and the bottom up. That way, the working-class folks have a shot and the middle class grows.
That’s when Biden broke out his utterly absurd line. Looking at the line of chefs and servers, a handful of whom were politely golf clapping as he ranted about issues from the Reagan days, he said, “And look: MGM culinary workers are the backbone of this nation! They are! They’re America’s backbone! How else would we slurp down 5000 calories while gambling our life savings?”
“That’s right, we wouldn’t be able to do it! Think how bad that’d be for the economy. All the downstream medical economic activity from the foot, all the exercise equipment needed to burn off that mac-n-cheese burger, the…uhhh…the gambling and the taxes on it. All that’s a lot of economic activity, Jack! And we couldn’t do it without your hard work.”