Last year, Elizabeth Warren shot to stardom in progressive circles when she explained in a speech that successful business-people didn’t achieve that success without help from the wider society, which funded the roads, schools, and other public goods that their enterprises rely on. This week, Sen. Scott Brown of Massachusetts, who Warren is challenging this fall, turned that argument into an attack on Warren, painting her as an enemy of small business.
On PoliticsNation Monday, Rev. Al Sharpton gave Warren a chance to respond. And in doing so, she gave a remarkably lucid and elegant summary of the basic differences in outlook not just between herself and Brown, but between the two competing political movements today.
Said Warren:
I love small businesses. My daughter started a small business, my brother started a small business, my aunt Alice started a small business, I worked in it when I was a teenager. This is really about a basic question of fairness. And that is, when big businesses really make it big, should they get the special tax breaks so that they don’t have to make the contributions to help support all of the basic infrastructure—you know, the roads and bridges and the schools and all those pieces, the basic infrastructure that lets the next kid make it big, and the next kid after that, and the next kid after that? You know, the way I see this, this is really about the basic question of how we build our future. The Republicans have given their vision of how we build our future—they’ve said, ‘I got mine, the rest of you are on your own’. Our vision of how you build a future is that you make the investments forward, so every kid has a chance. That’s what this is really about. Hard to put it better than that.
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