American middle class was wiped out during COVID-19: Democrat Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Washington: Robert F. Kennedy Jr, a Democrat who recently announced his 2024 candidacy for the White House, effectively challenging President Joe Biden's presumptive re-election bid, argued that the American middle class was "systematically" wiped out during the COVID-19 pandemic, Fox News reported.

Kennedy Jr. told Fox News' Neil Cavuto: "More than anything, we have to rebuild the American middle class. And part of that is getting away from the warfare economy. And doing what China originally did which is to build its power and project power by building its economy at home. The strength of a nation comes from a strong economy and a vibrant middle class. And we have wiped out the middle class in this country systematically."

Kennedy Jr. while referring to lockdown measures introduced in 2020, said: "Worst of all is what it did to the economy. It caused USD 16 trillion, according to Larry Summers, the IMF report, the Harvard report. We shifted USD 4 trillion in wealth from the American middle class to this new aristocracy of billionaires. We created 500 new billionaires. The Oxfam report, which came out this week, shows that the billionaires that existed at the beginning of the pandemic, the people like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeffrey Bezos, Bloomberg, etc., increased their wealth by 30 per cent during the pandemic. From the lockdowns. And Amazon got to shut down all of its competitors."

Cavuto challenged Kennedy Jr. on the stances of progressives within his own party, like Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., who supported a wealth tax, noting how families like the Kennedys would be the ones paying for such stipulation. "I don't think these huge disparities in wealth are healthy for our country or healthy for democracy. To have very, very high concentrations of wealth in a nation that is now marked by widespread poverty," Kennedy Jr. said in response.

"I'm in a better position to run against Donald Trump than any of the Democrats because I can hold him accountable for the worst thing that he did, which was the lockdowns. The lockdowns were absolutely catastrophic," Kennedy Jr., nephew of former President John F. Kennedy, said, as quoted by Fox News.