White House: Economy needs 'fair play'

The U.S. economy will fully revive only if everyone engages in fair play, the White House said, previewing a speech President Barack Obama was to give Tuesday.In a speech to be given at 12:55 p.m. CST in the Kansas town where President Theodore Roosevelt made the case a century ago for what he called the New Nationalism, Obama was expected to "lay out the choice we face between a country in which too few do well while too many struggle to get by, and one where we're all in it together -- where everyone engages in fair play, everyone does their fair share and everyone gets a fair shot," the White House said in a statement Monday night.Roosevelt, who faced times of sweeping change similar to those of today -- including a growing gap between rich and poor and a middle class squeezed and falling behind -- told an audience of 30,000 in Osawatomie, Kan., Aug. 31, 1910, a president could only succeed in making his economic agenda successful if he made the protection of human welfare his highest priority.He coined the phrase "a square deal," aimed at helping the middle class and weakening rule by a wealthy corporate elite, while at the same time protecting business from the most extreme demands of organized labor.A century later, the United States is "coming out of severe crisis, where inequality's been rising, the middle class is getting squeezed, there's a sense the rules don't apply ... people at the top aren't paying their fair share," a senior administration official told reporters on condition of anonymity under rules set by the White House.The United States has one of the world's largest income-inequality ratios between those at the top and the bottom, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said Monday.Inequality among working Americans jumped 25 percent since 1980, the report said. The average annual income of the top 10 percent of Americans was $114,000 in 2008, nearly 15 times higher than that of the bottom 10 percent."The president is going to say very clearly his sense of what's required ... where everyone gets a fair shot and a fair shake. That's going to animate not just the political debate next year, but the debate going forward," the official said.Obama will still push for short-term answers, such as extending middle-class tax cuts and raising taxes on the wealthy, both now stalled in Congress, the official said.Among the more famous lines from the 1910 speech, Roosevelt said: "In every wise struggle for human betterment one of the main objects, and often the only object, has been to achieve in large measure equality of opportunity. In the struggle for this great end, nations rise from barbarism to civilization, and through it people press forward from one stage of enlightenment to the next."One of the chief factors in progress is the destruction of special privilege. The essence of any struggle for healthy liberty has always been, and must always be, to take from some one man or class of men the right to enjoy power, or wealth, or position, or immunity, which has not been earned by service to his or their fellows."He called special interests those "who twist the methods of free government into machinery for defeating the popular will."