Schumer sees job creation and middle-class income growth as defining issues for 2014

Source: NBC

Sen. Charles Schumer of New York, the third-ranking Democrat in the Senate leadership, said Sunday that “the number one issue in the 2014 election is not going to be Obamacare or the deficit. It is going to be who can get the middle class going again, who can expand middle-class incomes, who can create jobs.”

Schumer’s comment on NBC’s Meet the Press was in the same vein as his argument last week that “job creation, (an increase in the) minimum wage, and unemployment insurance” will be the dominant issues for voters in 2014 elections.

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The New York Democrat contended last week that “the tectonic plates of our politics are changing, because the decline of middle-class incomes and the difficulty in average people getting good-paying jobs has overtaken the deficit as the number-one problem facing our political economy today.”

Schumer said that early in the New Year Senate Democrats will push an extension of an emergency unemployment benefits program that President George W. Bush signed into law in 2008. Schumer described that issue as a wedge that will divide Republicans in what he portrayed as “the fight between the hard right and the mainstream conservatives in the Republican Party.”


Read more: http://presspass.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/12/22/22007079-schumer-sees-job-creation-and-middle-class-income-growth-as-defining-issues-for-2014?lite&google_editors_picks=true

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I am sure the MSM will come up with some Third Way types who will argue that Democrats need to tack right and avoid issues such income inequality and relief for the middle class.