Brookings Institution: Blog: E.J. Dionne: A Conversation With House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi: Strengthening The Financial Security of America’s Working Families

Infrastructure investment, a national energy policy, education and job training for our low-skilled adults and low-income students, immigration reform and expanding trade to sell more American products oversees as they are built in this country, this is how you not only increase economic security for middle class Americans, but also expand the middle class in America. Educating Americans and putting them to work with good jobs that not only allows for them to pay their bills, but put money away and joy life in America.

You can talk about all sorts of government social programs to help people in poverty, but without a strong and expanding American middle class who are the real job creators in America because of the economic growth that they drive with their consumer spending, you won’t have the resources needed to pay for those social programs that you want. You can only tax so much and tax people who have money to tax. The larger the middle and even upper classes in America that you have, the more people with more money you have to do the things that we need government to do.

Infrastructure, energy, immigration, education and job training for our low-skilled adult population so they can get themselves good jobs that puts them in the middle class and even upper middle class, education reform so low-income students aren’t trapped in failing schools simply because of their zip code, that is you expand and strengthen the middle class in America. By freeing people up to be free and live their American dream and not need government to take care of them. This is the economic agenda that President Obama has pushed and that Leader Pelosi and her House Democratic Caucus should back as well. And a lot of them already do.