US President Barack Obama ignited a new power showdown with Republicans, vowing to improve the economy alone and said his administration created 9.4 million jobs in the last 51 months to “help the middle class” despite facing “obstruction”.

“We went through the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, we have climbed back. Since then, we have created 9.4 million new jobs over the past 51 months,” Obama said.

“Corporate profits are up, stock market is up, housing is improving,” he said yesterday in his remarks on economy here.

He, however, said that the middle class families are struggling despite an improvement in the state of the economy and blamed Republicans for the “obstructing” the growth of the country.

“We are making progress, but we still have a situation where those at the top are doing as well as ever but middle-class families all across the country are still struggling to get by. There are people who are working hard, they believe in the American Dream — it feels sometimes like the system is rigged against them,” he said.

“This obstruction keeps the system rigged for those who are doing fine at the top. It prevents us from helping more middle-class families,” the US President said.

Igniting a new power showdown with Republicans, Obama vowed to fix the economic system alone to “help the middle class”.

“As long as they insist on taking no action whatsoever that will help anybody, I am going to keep on taking actions on my own that can help the middle class — like the actions I’ve already taken to speed up construction projects, and attract new manufacturing jobs, and lift workers’ wages, and help students pay off their loans,” he said.

Obama said Republicans have a flawed theory of the economy that they cannot seem to get past.

“They believe that all we should be doing is giving more tax breaks to those at the top, eliminating regulations that stop big banks or polluters from doing what they want, cut the safety net for people trying to work their way into the middle class, and then somehow the economy is going to get stronger and jobs and prosperity trickle down to everybody,” he said.

“We could do so much more if we just rallied around an economic patriotism, a sense that our job is to get things done as one nation and as one people,” Obama said.

“Economic patriotism says that instead of stacking the deck in the favour of folks just at the top, let us harness the talents and ingenuity of every American and give every child access to quality education, and make sure that if your job was stamped obsolete or shipped overseas, you are going to get retrained for an even better job,” he said.

The President said economic patriotism means that the hard work of every American is rewarded instead of making it tougher for the middle—class.

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