Jeb Bush is making a stand for poor people across the country, highlighting the end result of the “Food Stamp President” Barack Obama’s failed economic policy that has increase the number of American taking government assistance.
Bush told the Detroit Economic Club this week that there were a “number of Americans on food stamps and living in poverty,” adding that, “the opportunity gap” is a “defining issue of our time.”
“More Americans are stuck at their income levels than ever before. It’s very hard for people to go from the bottom rungs of the economy to the top. Or even to the middle. This should alarm you.”– Jeb Bush
But it seems that Bush not the first potential 2016 Republican presidential to make his economic case in the economic ghost town better known as Detroit, Michigan.
Kentucky Senator Rand Paul (R) issued a sort of welcome message to Bush which noted that Paul had already made two pushes for “economic freedom zones” in Detroit.
“We hope Governor Bush continues to emulate Senator Paul by detailing his proposals and reaching out to help the party” Sen. Rand Paul spokesman Sergio Gor.
While both Paul and Bush can now tout that they are taking a different approach at branding themselves as the new breed of Republican presidential candidate, Bush may have a very slight advantage over Paul with an economic suggestion he made for Detroit back in 2013.
Bush said that if he was Mayor of Detroit, he would “repopulate” the city through immigration.
“It just seems to me that maybe if you open up our doors in a fair way and unleashed the spirit of peoples’ hard work, Detroit could become in really short order, one of the great American cities again. it would look different, it wouldn’t be Polish…But it would be just as powerful, just as exciting, just as dynamic. And that’s what immigration does and to be fearful of this, it just seems bizarre to me.”
Could this statement hurt or help Bush in the soon-to-be crowded 2016 GOP primary race?