Schumer: Dems Are Going to ‘Fill the Vacuum’ Trump Left

Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said Democrats’ new economic agenda would “fill the vacuum that Donald Trump left” when he campaigned on working class issues and then “abandoned them for the hard right Koch brothers.”

Schumer said, “We have already proposed a few things, an infrastructure plan. We don’t know where he is on infrastructure. We’re going to have to work with him on that. We have proposed already a $15 minimum wage. Trump won’t go for that. We have proposed a family leave proposal that works well. Here’s what we’ll propose tomorrow: number one, we’re going to go after the drug companies. We’ll create a special, special office that will just go after these drug companies when they raise prices so egregiously, and people can’t afford these drugs. We’re going to change the way companies can merge.”

“We have these huge companies buying up other big companies,” he continued. “It hurts workers and prices. The old Adam Smith idea of competition is gone. People hate it when their cable bills go up, their airline fees. They know that gas prices are sticky when the price of oil goes up on the markets, it goes right up but never goes down. How the heck did we let Exxon and Mobil merge? That was Democrats. We’ll go after that. That will help the average person lower their costs. And finally, we’re going to have tomorrow, a very novel idea of how to create 10 million jobs. There are 10 million Americans looking for good-paying jobs. We’re going to show them how to find them. That’s the beginning. Week after week, Month after month, we’re going to roll out specific pieces. Quite different than the Democratic party you have heard in the past. We were too cautious. We were too namby-pamby. This is sharp, bold and will appeal to the old Obama coalition.”

He added,”On this agenda, we are going to really shake things up. And we’re going to fill the vacuum that Donald Trump left when he campaigned on some of the things like this and then abandoned them for the hard right Koch brothers.”

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