Biden visits Pa. hometown, calls for more taxes on rich
SCRANTON, Pa. — President Joe Biden returned to his working-class childhood hometown of Scranton on Tuesday to call for higher taxes on the rich and cast former President Donald Trump as an out-oftouch elitist, part of an attempt to blunt the populist appeal of his predecessor’s comeback bid.
Biden’s stop opened three consecutive days of campaigning in the battleground state of Pennsylvania while his opponent spends much of the week in a New York City courtroom for his first criminal trial.
Biden used Scranton, a city of roughly 75,000 people, as the backdrop to argue that getting rich in America is fine, but it should come with heftier tax bills. He dismissed Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee and a billionaire, as a tool of wealthy interests.
It’s all aimed at reframing the conversation about the economy, which has left many Americans feeling sour about their financial situation at a time of stubborn inflation and elevated interest rates despite low unemployment.
“When I look at the economy, I don’t look at it through the eyes of Mar-aLago. I look at it through the eyes of Scranton,” the president said, contrasting his modest upbringing with the Florida estate where the former president lives.
Biden has proposed a 25% 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 took part in a training session for grassroots organizers at a union hall before swinging by his old house. Biden grew up in a colonial home in the Green Ridge neighborhood until his father struggled to find work and moved the family to Delaware when the future president was 10.
“Joe Biden has never forgotten where he’s from,” Scranton Mayor Paige Cognetti said 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.”
Biden was spending the night in Scranton before continuing to Pittsburgh on Wednesday and visiting Philadelphia on Thursday.