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 A day after giving an economic speech at Northwestern University
touting the success of his administration's economic policies, Obama
reveled in a new report showing the U.S. jobless rate had fallen to
a six-year low.
But at a town hall-style meeting at a manufacturing plant in
Indiana, the president said companies that have the strongest
balance sheets in history were not sharing their wealth with the
employees who helped fuel their success.
"It's not as if companies don't have some room to pay their workers
more. They're just not ... doing it," Obama told a friendly audience
at Millennium Steel Service.
"A greater and greater share has been going to the corporate balance
sheet and ... less and less of a share is going to workers."
Obama is hoping economic improvements will help buoy Democrats in
November congressional elections and avoid a Republican takeover of
the U.S. Senate. But despite a jobless rate down to 5.9 percent,
many Americans are still without jobs and feel disenfranchised in
the current economy.
Obama said companies were taking advantage of a still-soft labor
market in which people were afraid of leaving their jobs for fear of
not finding employment elsewhere.
The latest jobs figures could help change that. U.S. non-farm
payrolls rose by 248,000 last month and the jobless rate fell
two-tenths of a point to 5.9 percent, the lowest since July 2008,
according to the Labor Department.
"We're on pace for the strongest job growth since the 1990s," Obama
said.
Echoing his comments from Thursday, Obama said the positive economic
trends were a direct result of policies implemented by his
administration, including the government bailout of the U.S. auto
industry.
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He pressed companies to raise the minimum wage and rejected
arguments, in otherwise friendly questioning from the audience, that
doing so would make them less competitive.
Obama also got into a discussion with Indiana's Republican Governor
Mike Pence, a potential 2016 presidential candidate who has resisted
the Democrat's entreaties to expand the Medicaid healthcare program
for seniors in his state.
During a lengthy exchange on the tarmac after Air Force One arrived
at the Evansville airport, Pence told the president he would prefer
to expand a state program for the elderly instead of accepting the
federal government's option.
Opposing the expansion of Medicaid is a position many Republican
governors have taken for their states as a way to resist parts of
Obama's signature healthcare law, the Affordable Care Act.
"We have ruled out expanding traditional Medicaid, but as I
reiterated to the president today, if we have the opportunity to
build on the Healthy Indiana Plan to expand coverage the Indiana
way, we're open to doing that," Pence said.
White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Obama told Pence that
"thousands of Hoosiers would benefit" if Pence accepted Medicaid
expansion.
(Additional reporting by Steve Holland and Roberta Rampton in
Washington. Editing by Andre Grenon)
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