At a rally in Las Vegas, Vice President Biden laid out the clear choice in this election – in priorities, plans, and values – between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. He urged voters to elect Clinton and Catherine Cortez Masto so they can build an economy that works for all Americans, not just those at the top. Biden praised Clinton’s plans for paid leave, affordable education, and investments in 21st century jobs, and contrasted them with Trump’s lack of plans, understanding, and experience.
Biden slammed Trump for not paying federal income taxes, rooting for the housing crisis, and saying that American wages are too high. He also said Trump’s comments that the American intelligence community is uninformed and his mischaracterizations of our allies and adversaries are “undermining American security already.” Biden added that Trump does not have the “character and competence” to be president, and asked the audience, “let’s assume we had cell phones from the time the Republic was founded… can you imagine any president we ever have had in the history of America who would get up at 3:30 in the morning and tweet vile, denigrating comments about a woman”?
Biden urged attendees to support Hillary Clinton and the Democrats and to vote for revitalization, not regression, in America. Biden reminded Nevadans to take advantage of early voting, which ends on November 4th, or to make sure they get out and vote on Election Day.
Biden’s remarks, as transcribed, are below:
“The fact of the matter is — this is not hyperbole that Harry has been my friend since the day I met him, and the reason is, and I mean this sincerely, I came out and campaigned for him when I was a 32 year old kid and he was running for the House. And the thing about Harry is, you never have to wonder whether or not he means what he says and he’ll do what he means. Harry gives me more credit than I deserve. No, no, no. This is not for applause. I want you to listen closely to a couple things on the front end here. Number one, yeah, I’ve had some tough times in my life. So have you. So have an awful lot of people. Some, tougher than mine. But I have always had an entire family and friends behind me to help me get through. I have had enormous, enormous help.
I remember, when my wife and daughter were killed and I wasn’t sure if my boys were going to live. I remember, I had just been elected but I hadn’t been sworn in yet. I remember I had a secretary who was single with two children. For the first time of my life, I think I treated her well while we worked together — But I looked at her and thought, my god, what would her position be if the same thing happened to her? Think about the people you know, every single day getting up and putting one foot in front of the other. They’re up every single day with virtually no help and do what they’re supposed to do as a parent, as a brother and sister, a neighbor. That kind of people. That’s why we’re involved in this enterprise. That’s why we do what we do. […] everybody.
I really mean this. This is all about, Hillary’s about and we’re about — this is all about being family. I look at the country, I really do this — I look at the country as a neighborhood. I look at the country as one big neighborhood. Ladies and gentleman, some people live in pretty tough circumstances through no fault of their own. They break their neck and play by the rules. They do everything they’re supposed to do. And those institutions, those groups of people, whether it’s their church or their union or their neighborhood council — those people, who are there to help them during bad times, to lift them up, they’re getting battered too. Look what they’re doing to unions the last eight years. They declared war on labor’s house. They declared war on labor’s house. […].
Ladies and gentlemen, let’s start talking about Hillary’s opponent. It doesn’t take long for you to get exactly where it is. This man is unfit to be President of the United States of America. I never questioned another man’s motive where I look at when he says and what he does. That’s what he says and what he does. This is a man who is devoid of any substance of knowledge about America Security. This is a man who literally said [Audio break]. This is a guy who talks about Putin as being a strong leader, undermining our allies. I was at Davenport, Australia trying to work out something with the Prime Minister of Australia relative to China. I get a phone call from the Defense Minister of Latvia with the Baltic states on Russia border saying, ‘Joe, he’s not a leader. You got to come and talk […]’. They’re worried about those […] men. Russia’s special forces in uniform and no […] coming in.
This is real. This isn’t made up. So what did I have to do? I went and met with all the three presidents of Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania. And they asked me to speak to the whole country and countries to assure them that Donald Trump did not only represent us, did not represent the Republican Party. Ladies and gentleman, this is a man who says in the middle of a debate, when we are being undermined in the far, in the Middle East, by the Iranians and talking about us being supportive of Al Qaeda and all this malarkey, what has he said? When seventeen intelligence communities come out and say to him, ‘The Russian are hacking, they are hacking and Putin is the one doing it against the Democratic National Committee.’ He says, ‘The intelligence community do not know what they’re talking about.’
No, here’s the point folks, it’s not a boo or — this is about, what does that, what message does that send to the rest of the world? It says the manner — the man leading the Grand Ole Party — and it is the Grand Old Party — is out there saying our intelligence community is not worth counting on. The invasion of Mosul, which is underway, we’re going to defeat and break the back of ISIL and end the caliphate. He actually says, on national television, and by the way, those of you have traveled, I promise you, I have traveled over 1,150,000 miles for the president so far, just since being vice president. Everybody listens to the debates in other countries, do you hear me?
Everybody knows, we are so consequential. And he stands here and he says, ‘They are invading Mosul to kill ISIS in order to make Hillary look good.’ Ladies and gentleman, this man is either totally devoid of any knowledge or — I really mean it now. I really mean it. This is deadly earnest stuff, because he is undermining American security already. This is a guy who says that, ‘You know it is not bad that Japan and Saudi Arabia get nuclear weapons, that is a good idea’.
This is a guy who says, ‘We ban all Muslims from the United States.’ That is the real way of keeping cooperation going in the rest of the world, isn’t it? This is a guy — they actually ran clips of him on television. I do not have to make any of this up, saying that, ‘Because I am famous, I can grope.’ He has made the campaign so crude. ‘I can grope women and he names private places.’ Ladies and gentleman, I have spent my whole career. I am the guy who wrote Violence Against Women Act.
Wait a second, I have spent my whole career trying to change the culture. And here the presidential candidate says, ‘Because he is famous and powerful, he can grope any women he wants,’ and, quote, ‘They let him do it.’ That is a textbook definition of sexual assault. Ladies and gentleman, can you imagine, I should not have started on Trump. Let’s assume we had cellphones from the time the Republic was founded in 1789. Can you imagine, I mean this, this is deadly honest. I say this to the press and anyone listening. Can you imagine any president we ever have had in the history of America who would get up at 3:30 in the morning and tweet vile, denigrating, comments about a woman who had been Miss Universe. I mean, can you imagine what kind of mind it takes, can you imagine — I really mean it, not a joke.
Imagine any president ever doing that. What does it say about his character and his competence to lead this country? This is a guy who said, ‘I have not paid taxes in 18 years because I am smarter than you.’ That is the guy we want for president? This is a guy who says he rooted for the housing crisis because that is good business. How many of you know people who lost everything in the housing crisis? But he calls it good business and he wants to lead you? He wants to lead you?
And I say to every working man and woman out there, where I come, who are thinking of being for Trump. Trump said, ‘American workers get paid too much.’ If we don’t win back the Senate and we don’t end up with Hillary as president, remember I said this to all of you — all of you union people. You’ll be out of business in eight years. You hear me? Not a joke. Your union movement will be further crushed in eight years. Look at what the opponents of our candidates for Congress have said when Barry, our president, insisted, ‘If you work overtime, you’re going to get paid overtime.’ What they say? ‘That’s a violation, that’s a violation of free-enterprise.’ Their definition of free enterprise is, ‘I am allowed to abuse you, I am allowed to take advantage of you.’
Folks, look, let me just say a few things. One of the things I resent most about this campaign is that because he has been so patently outrageous in the things he said that would disqualify any other president. Because of that we have not been able to talk about the real issues in the campaign. The press has to cover what he says. How can they not cover it? So there’s been little discussion about the fact that it costs over $10,000 a year if you’re a single mother able to work but you have to pay over $10,000 a year if you have two kids — for child care — how do you do it? You can’t do it! If you’re in a big city in the east you’re paying $22,000 a year.
So Hillary comes along and says you’ll never have to pay more than 10 percent of your income. If we have all the women who are capable of working but not able to work now because of childcare, it increases the GDP by five tenths of one percent per year. That’s trillions of dollars over 10 years. It creates jobs for everybody else. I love how our Republican friends say, ‘Well, we’re for productivity and growth.’ They’re not for it at all! You put another $800,000 in the market it increases the value of everything we do.
Ladies and gentlemen, colleagues, I come from a neighborhood where virtually nobody went to college but everyone dreamed their kid would go to college. It was my dad’s absolute, unrelenting insistence that that happen. I have never been anywhere, whether I am down in Freeport, Louisiana or here, in Las Vegas, up in Butte, Montana or some of the barrios down along the Rio Grande. Wherever I have been. I have never met a single mother who doesn’t hope her kid could get to college. I don’t know one. All you labor guys know. Even the work you do today, you’re going to have to be educated along the root because technology is changing so rapidly you don’t need to go back and do two-years or four-years, you can do an 18-week program to learn. You can learn about photovoling technology to build solar panels by a 16-week program. You’re capable of doing any of the new jobs that are out there.
But here’s the deal guys. Nobody thinks that 12 years is enough anymore. One reason that we lead the world for so long is that we we’re the only nation in the world that had from the 1900s, 12 years of free education. No one else had that including Britain or anywhere else. The rest of the world caught up to us and 12 is not enough anymore. So Hillary comes along and says you should be able to have four-year college at a state school and you should have it free. We’ve been pushing for two years up to now. Two years of community college. I’ll give you one example.
People say, ‘There goes those Democrats and all these things, ‘big spender’ Democrats.’ Alright, here’s the deal guys. Let me give you one example and then I’ll stop. When Ronald Reagan was president, there were about $800 billion in tax loopholes. That is money was that supposed to be paid but didn’t get paid because of a law passed saying you don’t have to pay if you fall in the category. Now, every year, $1 trillion, $300 billion of loopholes. You can’t find me an economist anywhere that will justify more than $67 hundred billion of them having any social purpose. Reason for loophole is, you should be able to deduct the mortgage interest on your first home to encourage you to get a home.
You should be able to, if you take a real risk, if you risk all your money on a new invention and it pays off, you should be able to pay less tax on that to encourage growth. But ladies and gentlemen, if we put, right now, there are $6 million people in community college. If we made that free for everyone, it would jump to $9 million. It’d release student debt. The only people who could get that are colleges where you can transfer your credits to afford your school and you have to maintain a B average. But guess what? It costs a lot of money; it costs $6 billion a year. How do you pay for that?
Well, it’s real simple. Here’s how you pay for it. This is one example. You eliminate a thing called stepped-up basis. What the hell is that? I didn’t know what it was either. I have been listed, as […] will tell you, my whole career as the poorest man in the United States Congress. I’m not proud of it but it’s true. When I did my financial disclosures as Vice President — as my wife would say you can Google it — first paragraph of the Washington Post story said, ‘Quote, it’s probable, no man is has ever assumed the office of Vice President with fewer assets than Joe Biden.. I assume they meant financial, not intellectual. And there’s a reason for that. When I got elected, I committed I would never own a stock or a bond or any investment because there might be a conflict of interest, I committed, I’ve never taken on […], and I committed I’ve never been engaged in any business enterprise. I kept my promises, to the chagrin of my kids.
But here is the deal guys, here is the deal. Stepped-up basis means this: If you’re fortunate enough to have a wealthy father — and by the way, the wealthy is as patriotic as is the poor — but if you have a father or a mother who goes out and is able to buy a million dollars worth of stock, holds it for four years, now it’s worth $2 million. And on the way to sell it, if they were to sell it, they’d have to pay a tax on that million-dollar gain. They’d have to pay what they call it capital gains tax, which is less than their normal tax rate.
But God forbid, if on their way to sell it they get hit by a truck and all that’s left is the child and the next day the child sells it — the adult child sells it, they pay nothing. Now that cost — and by the way, these are good people — they make up four tenths of one percent of the population. But they’re already very, very wealthy; they don’t need a tax break that their parents didn’t even have. So here’s the deal, that cost the Treasury $17 billion a year. If I just eliminated that one tax cut, I could put every single solitary kid in community college for free and I can reduce the debt by $11 billion a year.
So my point is: everything Hillary calls for, she pays for. One last example: if you limited the amount you can deduct from your income tax to 28 percent, whether it’s a charitable deduction or something else, which means that doesn’t include any of you because you don’t pay that much — if you limit it to 28 percent, you know how much revenue you raise without doing any damage to anybody? $660 billion a year ends up in the Treasury. What does that go for? We can build airports, we can build ports, we can build roads, we can build highways, we can build bridges, we can build high-speed rail from California to here to Las Vegas.
Look, […] Catherine Masto gets it. She was my son’s — my Attorney General son — and she was one of his best friends. They’re three of only three Attorney Generals who rightly took on my own administration and said, ‘We’re not settling with the big banks because they cheated us and they went after them and she got, for this state, $2 billion more than you would have gotten otherwise.
Along with my son, this woman who has been fighting the abuse of women and children for a long time, and sex trafficking and finally — by the way I love her opponent talking about how she hasn’t gone back and I’m the guy who wrote the law about rape kits so you’d be able to end the backlog of rape kits, you could solve so many rape crimes — and her opponent saying, ‘She didn’t get it done.’ We had at least two votes I know of in that House that I pushed to get it done, and he voted no both times. As my grandfather said, ‘There ain’t no shame. There ain’t no shame.’
So look, guys, let me end here. Catherine is going to win. She has to win because — because Hillary needs a democratic senate, she really does. You hear this guy from Texas talking about the other guy wanting to be President. Talking about how they’ll hold up any nominee of Hillary Clinton’s for eight years. So look guys, we need you the next 10 days. Every day from this day on is Election Day in Nevada and I’m talking too long cause I want you all to get out there and get people out to vote. But just remember one thing about us, one thing about Americans. Americans never bow. We never bend. We never, ever, ever break. We always overcome. We always succeed. America owns the finish line. We own the finish line. They just have to get out of our way. Get out the vote. God bless you all and may God protect our troops. Go! Go! Go!”