WASHINGTON — Republican Indiana Sen. Jim Banks said Thursday that Republicans need to fight to ensure that the American dream becomes more easily attainable for working class Americans.
Banks said during a speech at the National Conservatism Conference that elected officials need to prioritize “building an economy that puts American workers first.” The Indiana Republican added that he is concerned that the American dream is presently “slipping out of reach” for many Americans.
“Look, I have lived the American dream,” Banks said during the speech. “I’m the son of a union factory worker and a nursing home cook. I grew up in a trailer park, and now I’m standing before you as a freshman member in the U.S. Senate representing the great state of Indiana. I don’t know about you, but it doesn’t get any better than that. This is the greatest country in the history of the world. But I fear that that same American dream is slipping out of reach for way too many Americans.”
“We all want our kids to live a better life than the one that we had. And that’s what my parents did for me,” Banks added. “They worked hard so that my two brothers and I would be better off and have a better opportunity, a better shot in this country than what they did. So how do we do that moving forward?”
The senator went on to state that the “sad reality” is that the American dream has become “almost impossible for so many young Americans today.”
“And this is more than just about a political fight,” Banks said. “It’s about preserving the American way of life in this great country. If people don’t own anything and don’t have a home that they’re building and investing in, if they don’t have a place to call a home, and if we let that life slip away, we lose the heart of what it means to be Americans.”
“People have to have something that’s worth fighting for, and that’s why I remember Tucker Carlson saying something a few years ago that I’ve thought about a lot since,” Banks continued. “He said that the candidates who make it easier for 30-year-olds to get married and have children will win and will deserve to win.”
“That’s why it didn’t shock me that a few months ago watching in New York City that a Democratic socialist [Zohran Mamdani] won their party’s nomination. And you can say what you want about the crazy left and people like AOC [Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez], she’s really crazy,” Banks said, describing two of the Democratic Party’s rising stars. “The radical left has an uncanny ability to find the wrong solutions to the real problems that people are facing. And that’s why Republicans have to learn lessons from what’s going on in New York City and from the radical left, some of these important lessons.”
The senator, in his speech, also described a memo he penned in March 2021.
“I laid out in that memo how thanks to President [Donald] Trump, the GOP was now the party of the working class and all of the political numbers and polling proved it. Our voters were now the blue collar coalition in the country, the mechanics, the custodians and small business owners had overwhelmingly voted for President Trump in 2016 and 2020, he said. “Meanwhile, the Democrats were turning into the party of the elites, Wall Street and college professors were flocking to the Democrat Party. And I thought we were better off for it as a Republican party.”
“So that’s why in the memo, I argued that the only way that we could be successful as a party was cementing the GOP as the party of the working class. And that means a lot of things, but it means building an economy that puts American workers first,” Banks emphasized.
Banks stated that Republicans have the opportunity to be “the party that preserves the American dream for ordinary, everyday hardworking people.”
A Wall Street Journal/NORC poll released Monday found that almost 70% of respondents said they think the American dream no longer holds true or never did, marking the highest share in nearly 15 years.
“The fact of the matter is that right now in America, it is too expensive for most young people to buy a home and start a family,” Banks said. “Rising GDP and a soaring stock market are great, but real success is what ordinary people care about the most. It is measured by the strength of our families and what we’re passing on to the next generations.”
“There are some in Washington, and a number of them in the U.S. Senate on my side of the aisle who are still resistant to embrace the American first agenda,” Banks added. “They want us to keep spending tax dollars on NPR and woke foreign aid, they care more about sweetheart tax breaks for corporations than delivering tax cuts for working families, and there are way too many swishy Republicans still in Congress today who want to undo President Trump’s tariffs. They are also pushing amnesty and they want to sell out American workers for cheap labor. We can’t let them do that.”
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