At a rally in Reno on Saturday, Vice President Joe Biden laid out the stakes in this election for Nevada families and highlighted Hillary Clinton and Catherine Cortez Masto’s vision for an economy that works for everyone, not just those at the top. Biden made the case that Trump’s foreign policy proposals, which would embolden Russia, alienate our allies in Eastern Europe and spread Islamophobia make him “the least qualified nominee of either political party in the history of the United States of America.” Biden said Trump would also endanger America economically, given his support for the “cockamamie policies” of trickle-down economics that enrich the superwealthy while raising taxes on millions of working families. Biden said, “This isn’t stuff – if we said – if you heard, this is not your father’s Republican Party. This is not anything you would have heard. […] We disagreed. But this ain’t your father’s Republican Party. This is a different group of people with a very different take on what America needs.”
Trump would also undermine one of the United States’ greatest sources of strength, its openness, Biden said, adding, “If Donald Trump had his way, no one with a, quote, ‘funny-sounding name’ would be here.” Biden told attendees that they should instead embrace that openness, which has helped us outrun our competitors in the world economy and put us “on the verge of resurgence in a way that America has not been positioned for over 75 years.”
Biden’s remarks, as transcribed, are below:
“Hello, folks. Good to see you all. Oh, I tell you what, today is Nevada Day, huh? Today, and the last week or so, between now and November – what is that election day? I think Trump – Trump says it’s the 28th. Is that what he said? I’m encouraging Trump to vote on the 28th. He knows about as much about elections as he does about the rest of the things he talks about.
Folks, there are just 10 days left, and early voting matters. It matters a lot. I want to say something to you at the top. You know, I just was in Las Vegas doing an event for Hillary and for Catherine, and large crowds, like here, and I used the expression that we Easterners always hear – you know, they advertise for Las Vegas back East by saying, ‘What happens in Las Vegas stays in Las Vegas.’ Well, the irony is what happens in Nevada spreads to the rest of the country in the election. No, it does. Once again – once again, you may very well be – not figuratively, literally – you may very well be the state that decides who the next president of the United States is going to be.
The reason I talk about early voting is – and I mean this sincerely. I’ve been around for some really, really close elections at the state level and the federal level, and what I’d beg you to all think about between now and election day: get everybody you know out to vote because you don’t – I mean this sincerely – you don’t want to wake up the next morning, on Wednesday morning, and say to yourself, ‘If I had just only gotten Mrs. Rodriguez. If I’d only taken her to the polls. If I’d only spent the time and got Mr. Sullivan, who’s in a wheelchair and he had trouble getting there. If I’d only made the effort to get him there.’ Not a joke. Don’t put yourself in that position, because it could be very close. This thing could be very, very close.
So my first plea to you is not only – but my guess is most of you already voted already, or if you haven’t –Continue to work to get people to the polls.
Now, look, they have thrown everything but the kitchen sink, as I used to say to my family, at Hillary and at all our candidates. And – but we can’t take our eye off the ball. We have to focus on what’s at stake. A lot of – it’s about our place in the world. It’s about how we’re viewed. I’m supposedly an expert on foreign policy. I know an expert is anyone from out of town with a briefcase. I don’t have a briefcase with me. But just since being Vice President, I’ve traveled over 1,000 – almost 200,000 – 1,200,000 miles. And here’s what I want to tell you. This is not a joke. Everywhere I go – and I literally know every major head-of-state person, not because I’m important, but just because of my job, and my before that was chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee – I promise you, I promise you, they watch the presidential debates, they watch what’s happening, because we are so consequential to their countries. It matters so much to the free world, and it matters so much to those who wish to turn the world upside down, what we do.
And so we have to imagine – look, I was recently down in Australia because there was a new election for prime minister. The same guy got elected with a small margin. We have a big thing down there relating to what’s going on in the South China Sea and what’s happening in Southeast Asia. And we’re working with the Australians, our allies, relative to the so-called rebalancing of our military in that region of the world, and they’re worried about China. While I was there, I got a phone call from the president – the leader of a little country called Latvia, one of the Baltic states. They’re right on the border of Russia. They have a Russian-speaking population between 20 and 35 percent, and Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia are scared to death what’s going to happen to them with Putin sending, as he’s facetiously referring to them, ‘little green men,’ Russian special forces with no patches on, across the border, like they did – like they did in Ukraine.
And you know what he asked me? He said, ‘Joe,’ – […] defense minister, ‘Joe, you have to come.’ This is the God’s truth. ‘You have to come to reassure my population. You have to reassure the Baltic states.’ So I showed up. All three presidents of the three countries together met me there. They asked me to address in a national address all of their countries to assure them that Donald Trump did not only not speak for the Democrats but did not speak for the Republican leadership either. They’re worried to death. They’re worried to death.
This relates to our physical security as well. Donald Trump further alienating 1,300,000,000 people who practice Islam, 1,300,000,000 around the world that we need, we need cooperation to go after ISIS and al-Qaida. This is the guy who’s doing us great damage already.
And our economy – our economy grew at almost 3 percent this quarter. Our economy created more jobs. We created more jobs than all the other industrial nations of the world combined since the recession, but we have so much more to do. And this guy wants to put brakes on it, to go back to the – they think we all sort of have amnesia. What got us into this problem in the first place, folks, remember, whether you’re Democratic or Republican – and I hope there’s some Republicans in here – whether you’re Democrats or Republicans, what got us into trouble in the first place, the cockamamie policies – for real: the trickle-down theory of the Bush administration.
So this guy – this guy is – has a fundamentally different view. This is a guy who says – and this is out of his word – you don’t have to make up any – you don’t have to make up anything in this election. That’s good. That’s the interesting part. She doesn’t have to make up a single thing about how her opponent always voted. There have been seven times they voted for the Ryan budget in the Congress. He’s voted for these. He’s voted to cut education by $2.9 billion a year. He votes to cut Medicare and Medicaid, says that we should turn Social Security into a privatization where we would it into the marketplace. I know, I know. But you know, as the President says, ‘Don’t boo, vote.’ Look here. But I want to – I want to remind everybody, which you know, the gravity of what we’re talking about here. This isn’t stuff – if we said – if you heard, this is not your father’s Republican Party. This is not anything you would have heard. You would have heard from Ronald Reagan’s best friend, who used to be a senator from this great state, a Republican. This is not anything you hear from […]. And he might disagree. We disagreed. But this ain’t your father’s Republican Party. This is a different group of people with a very different take on what America needs.
And you know every election you say it’s the most important one. The consequences for the country, not only in the editorial pages of the United States but of every major country in the world, talks about how radically our image in the world could be damaged and hurt, and in consequence, our interests in the world.
Ladies and gentlemen, as I said, you don’t have to make anything up when it comes to Donald Trump. You know it’s – he is the least qualified nominee of either political party in the history of the United States of America. This guy, he praises Putin all throughout Europe and the world talking about him being a strong leader, as he, Putin, uses his intelligence community to hack into cyberspace here in the United States. This is a guy who didn’t even know that Crimea was part of Ukraine – it’s a part of Ukraine that’s already occupied. This is a guy who said in a debate for the whole world to hear and embarrass us that, in fact, the reason why we were looming on eliminating the caliphate, the ISIS capital in Iraq, Mosul, was because to make Hillary look good. This is a man who said for the whole world to hear, and playing to Putin’s role, that America’s weak and doesn’t know what they’re doing, saying that even though he was briefed – he gets briefed now because he’s a presidential candidate, like I do in the morning with the intelligence briefing. Seventeen – seventeen national security agencies said no, we’re being hacked by the Russians. And he says, ‘These intelligence agencies don’t know what they’re talking about.’ What does that say about us a nation? Does that encourage people to have confidence in us? Does that encourage people to act rationally? And ladies and gentlemen, he’d be happy to see Japan and Saudi Arabia become nuclear powers. Wouldn’t that be really good? Wouldn’t that be really good?
Look, folks, this is a guy who has, as my mother used to say, no sensibilities. No, he has no – no touch, no feel for human emotions. Here’s a guy who says that I didn’t pay taxes for, what is it, 18 years? Well, […] then he looks at us and he says, ‘Because I’m smarter than you.’ A president of the United States? Can you imagine any president saying that? This is a guy who, when you were dying out here in the sand states like you and Arizona and Florida in the housing crisis, said he bet on the housing crisis because, quote, ‘It was good business.’ You lost everything. You lost that money you were going to borrow against to send your kid to college. You lost that savings you thought you’d have so you’d never have to rely on your child to take care of you. You lost everything. And he says it’s great business? God almighty.
Look, stiffing hundreds of contractors and workers and labor people. And when asked, he says – well, what did he say? No, but it’s really – I mean, I want you to focus on this. What did he say? He said, ‘Maybe I didn’t like the work that they did.’ This is a man who abuses power. My father, who was a decent, honorable, high school-educated guy with great grace, my father used to my siblings and me, ‘The greatest sin of all is the abuse of power.’ Whether it’s economic power, political power, or physical power – a man raising his hand to a woman or a child. And here’s a guy – think about this. Can you imagine any president in American history, if they had had the same technology, getting up at 3:30 in the morning – no, really, I mean, think about this. Not in terms of – just think about this in cold, calculated terms. What does it say about a man who would be president, gets up at 3:30 in the morning and tweets vitriol about a former Miss Universe and her body, calls women pigs.
Look, the thing that I resent most about him – and I don’t even want to say some of the things that he said on the record because we’ve become – the discourse is so crude. It’s so crude. It’s dumbing down the discourse of America. It really does.
Ask your friends who say they’re going to vote for Trump, ask them whether or not they want to let their 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12-year-old daughter listen to the debate. Think about that. Think about the fact that there were tens of thousands of mothers and fathers who got up and turned off the television on a presidential debate because of the conduct of a man. I spent my whole life as a public official. I’m the guy that – this is not […]. I’m the guy who wrote the Violence Against Women Act. I’m the guy who spent time going to college campuses about changing the culture on campuses. And by the way, think what this guy has done. This guy in what he said on that tape, because he was a star – because he was a star – I won’t say – use the same terminology he used. Because he was a star, he could approach and do anything to a woman because he was powerful. That is – I’m a lawyer, so is Catherine. That is a textbook definition of sexual assault. If you go to law school, that’s what they say sexual assault is.
But we got to look on the other side of this. It’s clear he’s not qualified, but it’s also clear that we reached a point in coming out of this crisis where America’s ready to get up and move, man. We have gone from crisis to recovery. We’re on the verge of resurgence in a way that America has not been positioned for over 75 years. Think of this. Name me a country that can compete with us. Think about this. I remember as a young senator at the vaulted Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania debating a conservative think tank leader when he said Japan was going to own America. Come on, man. Raise your hand if you’re worried about Japan owning America. And then we heard, remember, ‘The European Union’s formed, 385 million people – they’re going to eat our lunch.’ Raise your hand if you’re worried about the EU eating our lunch. We want them to do better for God’s sake.
And now, what do you hear? Trump and others saying, ‘China is going to own us.’ Ladies and gentlemen, China does not have enough energy. They don’t even have enough water. They are talking about a $2 trillion project to change the direct of their two major rivers to flow in the opposite direction just so their people will have enough water to drink. They’ve polluted with cadmium about 20 percent of all their arable land. Trade places with the United States, for God’s sake? And by the way, name me a product in the world, name me a new high-tech product that wasn’t thought of and made in America. Name me one.
There’s a reason for that. Catherine gets it, I get it. You know why? Because we are open. We have an open policy where we have in the United States our strength and our power comes from the fact we’ve had a constant flow of immigrants into this country. That’s why we’re who we are. Ladies and gentlemen, drive through Silicon Valley. Come with me, come with me. If Donald Trump had his way, no one with a, quote, ‘funny-sounding name’ would be here. Every single solitary person who walks across a college stage getting a PhD this year should get a PhD and a green card, because we want that expertise here with us.
There’s only two things that we have to do to make this renaissance real and move now. Two big things, and Cathy’s been talking about them all the time. Number one, we have to have the best-educated public in the world. My wife used to always say – she was a college professor. She’d always say, ‘Any country that out-educates us will out-compete us.’ Ladies and gentlemen, 12 years of education is no longer enough. My labor friends know. They have to constantly be retraining to keep up with the new technology that’s coming. Your generation, kids, you are going to see more happen in the next 10 years in America than has happened in the last 75. Digitalization is going to change the way beyond anything you can imagine what we can do now, but we have to constantly be re-educated. And we’re fully and thoroughly capable of it. And a significant portion of it doesn’t need two years or four years or eight years of college education.
Some if it just requires – Catherine talked about solar, a major new solar facility opened up in northern Michigan. They found out that they needed 20,000 people […], 1,000 people to work right away, but no one knew anything about photovoltaic technology. So they put in a program that her opponent didn’t support for community colleges working with local businesses. They brought in the machinery to teach people how to handle a photovoltaic machine so they could do it. It took 14 weeks. That’s all it takes. But ladies and gentlemen, there’s nothing American workers can’t do. The same person who’s moving coal – they have to – we have to give people the chance. When has America – when did they ever let their country down?
Let me give you one example: education. And I could go on too long here about this, but let me just give you one example on education. Republicans will say every time Catherine and I say something, ‘There go the big-spending Democrats.’ Well, let me give you a few examples. We’re all about growth and productivity. Go to any major business corporate leader and ask him, ‘What’s the thing you need most?’ He’ll say, “A better-educated workforce.’ That’s what he’ll say, okay? Well, we know how to get a better-educated workforce. If we just send every single community college student to college and didn’t cost – it didn’t cost them anything, we’d go from 6 million in college to 9 million. If we just educated those people every year, the gross domestic product – that’s the combination of all being put together – would rise two-tenths of 1 percent. That’s over a trillion dollars over a decade. That grows the economy.
But here’s what it costs, a lot of money. It costs $6 billion a year to do that. So, ‘Oh my God, there goes Democrats again.’ Well, guess what? When Ronald Reagan was president, we had written into the tax code roughly $800 billion worth of tax loopholes. They call them tax expenditures. Now, some of them make a lot of sense. Some of them allow you – one of the biggest ones is allow you to deduct the interest on your mortgage payment. That makes sense because – why? – it’s a social purpose to get people to own a home, not just have to rent it. Some of it makes sense where you encourage people to go out and risk everything they have to come up with a new invention that will help America. They should get – pay less tax for taking that chance.
But ladies and gentlemen, you know how much it is now in loopholes per year? A trillion, three hundred billion. There’s not a single economist in the world can give you an explanation for more than 6- to 800 billion of that having anything to do with growing the economy. But we know how to grow the economy. For example, right here in Reno, Nevada. In Nevada, if you are a woman or a single man like I was raising two kids, if you’re in a position where you need to put your kids in daycare, average cost here in Nevada is about $11,000; in Los Angeles, about $22,000. So how do people do it?
So instead of giving – we – if we gave a sufficient tax credit for child care, we could put hundreds of thousands of women back in the workplace who are fully capable and qualified. We would increase the gross domestic product by close to seven-tenths of 1 percent a year, growing economy significantly. And we could do it all – we could do that, we could do the education piece, all of it, if we just did one thing: limited the ability of the super wealthy to take deductions to 28 percent. Not punish them, just to 28 percent. Do you know how much additional income that would produce? Six hundred and sixty billion dollars a year.
So folks, Cathy and I know how to do this. We know how to do this. This is not rocket science. Paid leave. Look, I come from a place – I come from Scranton in a little steel town called Claymont […] Scranton and a little steel town called Claymont, Delaware.”
AUDIENCE MEMBER: “Delaware.”
VICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: “Now, the idea – thank you. The idea that we have – right now we have Family Medical Leave Act, which gives a parent 12 weeks of unpaid leave after the birth of a child. Now, the neighborhood I grew up in, the guys and women I grew up with – still – I don’t know anybody in my neighborhood – and we were fine. We lived in a three-bedroom split level house, four kids, my grandpa, my mom and dad. It was fine. We thought we were doing just fine and we did do just fine. We didn’t think we were living in a bad place. But let me tell you, the idea that my father could go three months without a paycheck is bizarre.
I used to have this argument with the economists at the White House. They said, ‘The middle income is $52,120.’ I said, ‘Let’s see what middle income is. Middle income and income is being able to send your kid to a park in your home state, being able to own your own home and not rent, being able to send your kid to high school to get to college, being able to get into college and get him there, and being able to take care of your mom or your dad when the other one passes away, and hope your kids never have to change.’
Guess what. Over 40 percent of the American people can’t afford to miss one month of their paycheck, not one single month. So getting this family leave is wonderful for guys like me. You pay me over 200 grand a year to be Vice President. It’s good for me, for somebody in my situation but it’s sure as hell not good for the over 40 percent of the American people who don’t have enough savings to be able to go one month without a paycheck. So guess what. We think there should be paid family leave for people.
And, again, my dad used to say, ‘Joey, everything’s a matter of priorities.’ It’s a bigger priority to allow someone to have stepped-up bases. Do you know what that is? I didn’t know what it was.
If you buy the – when I was always listening to the – as Harry could tell you, as the poorest man in the Congress for real, my financial disclosure. When I did my financial disclosure as Vice President, a lead article in The Washington Post said – and my wife would say, ‘You can Google it.’ It said, quote, ‘It’s probable no man has ever assumed the Office of Vice President with fewer assets than Joe Biden.’ I assume they weren’t talking about […] assets. That’s because I made a deal with my citizens. I said I’d never own a stock or a bond because it could be a conflict of interest. I said I would never take an honorarium from anybody who had business with the Congress. And I said I’d never be involved in a business enterprise as long as I was a Senator. And, ladies and gentlemen, to the chagrin of my kids, I’m the poorest guy in the Senate. But you paid me well, now. [Cheers and applause.] You paid me well, though.
Here’s the deal. Right? I didn’t know what this – this is the last example I will give. The –
AUDIENCE MEMBER: “[…]”
VICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: “Pardon me?”
AUDIENCE MEMBER: “[…] because we all love you.”
VICE PRESIDENT BIDEN: “Oh. Look, rich people are good people, too. [Laughter.] I wish – I have three children now. They all did very well in school, did very well. My one son who just passed away was a great war veteran. He was making a lot of money. He decided he wanted to be Attorney General and took a $250,000 pay cut. Nobody had ever gave him that money before. Another son went to Yale Law School, got out. He started working at an investment bank. He said, ‘Dad, I want to do something that’s worthwhile.’ He’s managing the World Food Program now. And then I have a daughter who went to Penn Graduate School, paid more in tuition than, in fact, she makes now running the largest nonprofit for at-risk children. I should have had – I should have had one Republican kid so that when they put me in the hole, I’d have a window and a view. You know what I mean?
Well, look, all kidding aside, I just want – this is the last example I’ll give you. Stepped-up basis means that if you have enough money, you go out there, and you buy a million dollars’ worth of stock, you hold it for four years, it’s worth now $2 million, and you go to sell it. If you sell it, you have to pay tax on the gain, the million dollars you gained. And you pay a tax called capital gains, which is less than your income tax payment. But if, God forbid, on the way to sell it, you get hit by a truck and you die and you leave it to your son or your daughter and they sell it the next day, they pay nothing. They’re good people. They make up 4/10 of 1 percent of the population to the taxpayer. They, in fact, they, in fact, are already very wealthy. The last thing they need is an additional tax break that even their parents didn’t have.
Now, if you just eliminated that one tax break that does – it doesn’t have any social redeeming value in terms of economic growth, that puts an extra $17 billion a year in the Treasury. All you have to do is eliminate that. You can pay for every single, solitary kid in community college, and you can reduce the deficit by $11 billion a year.
So, look, let me conclude by just saying a few things about Catherine. Catherine – two things you’ve got to know about Catherine. One, she’s smarter than you. And, two, she has a backbone like a ramrod. No. For real. Catherine understands this world […], but the reason I love her – and her husband’s a very close friend of mine and a former Secret Service agent, helped me when I tried to get accommodation years ago. The reason I love her is she understands that it’s more than just about the economy. It’s about your dignity. It’s about your sense of pioneer respect.
My dad when we had to move from Scranton, Pennsylvania when I was in third grade in the early ‘50s down to Wilmington, I remember my dad made what I call the longest walk a parent ever has to make, up the shortest flight of stairs, to tell their children, ‘Honey, I’m sorry. You can’t play in that ball club anymore. You can’t go back to St. Paul’s’ or ‘can’t go back to Cooper School. Dad lost the house. Daddy and Mommy has to go find another job.’
And my mom’s dad was a proud man, an all-American football player at Santa Clara in 1906. His name was Ambrose Finnegan. I think about it as I’ve grown up, about how much courage and how much of my dad’s pride it probably took away to walk into my grandpop’s pantry with his four – my mom’s four brothers – one had died by the end of World War II – and say, ‘Ambrose, okay if I leave Jill and the kids with you here? I promise I’ll make it up.’ That’s a hard thing for a proud man or woman to have to do. But I remember him sitting on the edge of the bed in my grandpa’s home, my word, saying, ‘Joey, it’s going to be okay. I’m going to come home almost every weekend. It’s only 153 miles.’ I thought that was like going to the moon. He said, ‘But everything’s going to be okay. And when it is, I’m going to bring you, Mom, and the kids down, and we’re going to be fine.’ And he did just that.
And from that time on, every time you hear about someone losing a job because, remember, there’s a recession, someone around my dad’s dining room table lost a job, his brother or sister or neighbor or somebody. And my dad used to say, ‘Joey, the job’s about, I’d say, a lot more than a paycheck. It’s about your dignity. It’s about respect. It’s about your place in the community. It’s being able to hold your head up.’ That’s what it’s about. It’s about so much more.
These other guys don’t get it. Catherine feels it in her bones. She fully understands that this is about more than just restoring continued economic growth. It’s about restoring pride and our dignity, recognizing the worth of the American people, just how good we are.
We are a good people. We are made up of every single race and religion in the world. You can’t define what an American is – you can’t – you can’t – think about this. The only great democracy in the world, you can’t define what an American is, like you can a Frenchman or a Brit or anyone else, based on their religion or ethnicity, their heritage. You can’t do it in America. You cannot do it in America. We’re so diverse.
But we are one thing. We are one thing. We really do at our core subscribe to the notion that we hold these truths self-evident that all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator, the right to do life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That’s all people want, man. That’s all you want. You don’t want a handout. You just want the government to understand your problem and give you a fighting chance.
So, ladies and gentlemen, the fact of the matter is that I don’t know anybody I campaign with around the country more – who understands that more in her gut, her every basic instinct than Catherine. And you can taste it. You can smell it. You can feel. You know it’s real. You know it is real. It is real with her. She’ll never, ever, ever let you down.
Did you ever ask yourself – did you ever ask yourself – did you ever ask yourself why the Koch brothers are spending so much money? No, no. Think about it. What’s the one thing powerful interests don’t want, whether they’re Democratic powerful interests or Republican powerful interests? What’s the one thing they don’t want? They don’t want somebody who will refuse to bend, who will refuse to bow, who will refuse to give up what they are.
Can you imagine Catherine if our nominee was Donald Trump? Can you imagine? Even if they told her, ‘If you walk away from him, you’re going to lose,’ can you imagine her not speaking out? Look, her opponent is not a bad man, but it takes courage and it’s going to take more courage to take down the interests we need to clean out the rest of the barn out there, man. It’s because they go up over.
Remember, we’re Americans. We never bow. We never bend. We never break. We always come back. We own the finish line. We are America. Remember that. Let’s take it back. Thank you. God bless our troops. Thank you.”