Biden heads to Pa., calls for more taxes on rich
Casts Trump as elitist in hometown speech
SCRANTON, Pa. — President Joe Biden made a nostalgic return to the house where he grew up in working-class Scranton on Tuesday, kicking off a multi-day swing through Pennsylvania where he called for higher taxes on the rich and tried to cast Donald Trump as an out-oftouch elitist.
Biden is looking to gain ground in a key swing state while his opponent spends much of the week in a New York City courtroom for his first criminal trial.
A city of roughly 75,000, the president used Scranton to argue that getting rich in America is fine, but should come with heftier tax bills. He dismissed Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee and a billionaire, as a tool of wealthy interests.
“When I look at the economy, I don’t look at it through the eyes of Mar-a-lago. I look at it through the eyes of Scranton,” the president said, contrasting his modest upbringing with the Florida estate where the former president now lives.
Biden has proposed a 25 percent minimum tax rate for billionaires, which he said would swell federal coffers by hundreds of billions of dollars. He added that such levies are “how we invest in the country.”
“Scranton values or Mar-a-lago values,” Biden said. “These are the competing visions for our economy that raise questions of fundamental fairness at the heart of this campaign.” He spoke at a community center from a stage flanked by a banner reading “Tax Fairness for All Americans.”
The president said decades of GOP policies that cut taxes for the wealthy with the idea of stimulating the economy “failed America, and Donald Trump embodies that failure.”
He detailed his own working class upbringing while scoffing that Trump’s background taught him little more than “the best way to get rich is to inherit it.” Along the way, Biden worked in jokes about the sharp fall in market value of the former president’s social media platform.
Biden was also taking part in a training session for grassroots organizers at a union hall. Crowds lined the streets to mostly cheer, though there were protests against the Biden’s administration’s support for Israel in its war with Gaza.
“Joe Biden has never forgotten where he’s from,” said Scranton Mayor Paige Cognetti before Biden’s speech.
Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro echoed the idea, saying, “This is a guy who has never forgotten the people he grew up with.”
After spending the night in Scranton, Biden will be heading to Pittsburgh on Wednesday, then go back to the White House, then on to Philadelphia on Thursday.
“It’s hard to draw paths to Biden winning the White House that don’t involve Pennsylvania,” said Daniel Hopkins, a political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania. No Democrat has become president without winning the state since Harry Truman in 1948.