Quote:
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Yeah. I — first of all, thank you both for being here. And yours is a — a story I hear around the country as I travel, and in terms of both rightly having the right to have aspirations and dreams and ambitions for your family and working hard and finding that the American dream is, for this generation and so many recently, far more elusive than it’s been. And we need to deal with that, and there are a number of ways.
One is bringing down the cost of everyday necessities, including groceries. So, that’s why I’m taking on, for example, price gouging, which is when — you know, most companies and corporations are good, but for those bad ones, they take advantage of people, especially during a pandemic or extreme weather, and they end up jacking up prices. And there needs to be accountability and consequence for that. So, I’m going to be taking on price gouging.
But it’s also about dealing with what we need to do around homeownership, right? So, as someone mentioned during this — this film — look, I grew up a child of a mother who worked very hard. She raised me and my sister. And she saved up, and by the time I was a teenager, she was able to buy a home.
And we grew up, actually, for a long time, in an apartment on top of a childcare center that was owned by the woman we called our second mother, because she helped my mother raise us, and she was a small business owner: Ms. Shelton.
So, I’ll bring all this together to tell you: The way I think about it is, one, when people work hard and have a dream of buying a home, we should give you the opportunity to be able to do that, which is why part of my plan is for first-time homeowners — -buyers to have a $25,000 down payment assistance to buy your first home. Because people just need — (applause) — to be able to get their foot in the door, and then you’ll do the hard work.
Part of my plan is what we need to do to support small businesses, because my second mother was a small-business owner. And I love our small businesses and our small-business owners. They are not only business leaders, they are community leaders. They — they mentor; they hire locally. And we have so many entrepreneurs in our country who have great ideas, incredible work ethic, but not necessarily access to capital, because not everybody, like my opponent, was handed $400 million on a silver plate that he filed bankruptcy six times on. (Laughter.)
And so, part of my plan is to give start-up small businesses a $50,000 tax deduction to start up their small business. Right now, it’s $5,000. Nobody can start a small business with $5,000. So, that’s part of my plan.
