In an effort to further portray himself as a crusader for the welfare of the middle class President Barack Obama accused Republicans of wanting to "accelerate" the growing income inequality that has the wealthiest Americans gaining an even larger slice of the economic pie, according to CNN.
"That problem that we've got right now is you've got a portion of Congress who - whose policies don't just want to, you know, leave things alone, they actually want to accelerate these trends," President Obama told ABC News.
"There's no serious economist out there that would suggest that, if you took the Republican agenda of slashing education further, slashing Medicare further, slashing research and development further, slashing investments in infrastructure further, that that would reverse some of these trends of inequality," President Obama continued.
A recent study from the University of California, Berkeley found that in the between the years of 2009 to 2012 95 percent of income gains went to the top one percent of the population, according to CNN.
"The folks in the middle and at the bottom haven't seen wage or income growth, not just over the last three, four years, but over the last 15 years," President Obama said.
In fact, it's not that families haven't seen income growth, they have actually seen their income shrink since 2000. After adjusting for inflation the median household income has dropped $4,000 in that time span while the cost for necessities such as gas and food have gone up, according to CNN.
"This growing inequality isn't just morally wrong; it's bad economics," President Obama said in July. "Because when middle class families have less to spend, guess what, businesses have fewer customers. When wealth concentrates at the very top, it can inflate unstable bubbles that threaten the economy."
