Obama hits out at 'social Darwinism'

Washington: President Barack Obama will on Tuesday deliver a sharply worded riposte to Republicans advocating swingeing budget cuts, accusing them of "social Darwinism" that will bring an end to the American dream.

His remarks will lay the foundations of an election-year battle aimed at portraying Republicans as heartless towards ordinary Americans while looking after millionaires, while the Democrats advance the interests of the middle class.

The budget proposal put forward by Republicans in the House of Representatives last month is nothing but "a Trojan horse", Mr Obama will say on Tuesday at a lunch organised by the Associated Press.

"Disguised as a deficit-reduction plan, it's really an attempt to impose a radical vision on our country. It's nothing but thinly veiled social Darwinism," the president will say, according to remarks released in advance by the White House.

"It's antithetical to our entire history as a land of opportunity and upward mobility for everyone who's willing to work for it – a place where prosperity doesn't trickle down from the top, but grows outward from the heart of the middle class," he will say.

By "gutting" education and research and development, Republicans are proposing a "prescription for decline", Mr Obama will say.

The remarks will be the president's first direct response to the election-year budget put forward by Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House budget committee, that would cut taxes and impose deep spending reductions in an effort to shrink the size of the federal government.

Mr Obama will build on the themes of economic fairness that he promoted during an address in Kansas in December and again at the State of the Union address in January.

The remarks come on the same day that Wisconsin holds its primary in the Republican presidential contest. Mitt Romney, favourite to win the Republican nomination, has been endorsed by Mr Ryan, a Wisconsin representative, and is leading the polls.

Mr Ryan's budget plan attempts to put a conservative stamp on efforts to tame soaring US debt levels and reform the tax system and was welcomed by Mr Romney.

"I applaud Ryan and his colleagues for taking a bold step toward putting our nation back on the track to fiscal sanity and robust economic growth," he said.

Mr Romney, a self-made multimillionaire, has been widely accused of being out of touch with the plight of ordinary Americans and Mr Obama has recently sought to capitalise on that.

He will step up his efforts on Tuesday, warning that the economy, while improving, has still not yet recovered and that many Americans are still struggling to make ends meet.

"In this country, broad-based prosperity has never trickled down from the success of a wealthy few," he will say. "It has always come from the success of a strong and growing middle class … That's why a CEO like Henry Ford made it his mission to pay his workers enough so they could buy the cars that they made."

The White House has been promoting a "Buffett rule" that would require Americans making more than $1m a year to pay a tax rate of at least a 30 per cent, regardless of whether their income comes from capital gains or earnings. The rule has acquired its moniker as a result of comments by Warren Buffett, the billionaire investor, who has said that his secretary pays a higher tax rate than he does.

Under the Ryan budget plan, millionaires would receive an average $150,000 tax cut, senior administration officials say.

In his speech in Osawatomie, Kansas last year, Mr Obama summoned the spirit of another president, Teddy Roosevelt, who spoke in the same city a century before about his "new nationalism" and the need for a fairer system that supported the middle class.

"Roosevelt knew that the free market has never been a free licence to take whatever you want from whoever you can – it only works when there are rules of the road to ensure that competition is fair, open and honest," he said.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2012

Posted on www.ft.com on April 3, 2012 11:01 am