US Presidency
2013

Then Washington doled out bigger tax cuts to folks at the top income brackets, smaller minimum wage increases for people who were struggling. You combine all this and the income of the top 1 percent quadrupled from 1979 to 2007, but the typical family's incomes barely budged. So a lot of middle class families began to feel that the odds were stacked against them and they were right. And then for a while, this was kind of papered over because we had a housing bubble going on, and everybody was maxing out on their credit cards, everybody was highly leveraged, there were a lot of financial deals going around. And so it looked like the economy was going to be doing okay, but then by the time I took office, the bottom had fallen out. And it cost, as we know, millions of Americans their jobs or their homes or their savings. And that long term erosion of middle class security was evident for everybody to see.