Irked by Critics, Obama Says He’s Good for Business

The White House(CHICAGO) — Deviating from his prepared remarks for minutes at a time, an apparently irked President Obama responded to critics who’ve called him anti-business, pointing to improved corporate profits and mocking Republican policies, during his economic speech in Chicago Thursday.

Those critics’ “notion is that this agenda I just outlined is somehow contrary to pro-business, pro-capitalism, free-market values,” Obama said, appearing at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.

The president had just reiterated some of the stump-speech points made during his 60 Minutes interview — that the economy is better than when he took office, but that many Americans aren’t feeling the benefit — and had gone on to call for his usual array of economic measures: infrastructure spending, tax reform, clean-energy investment, greater availability of high-quality preschool education, immigration reform, student-loan relief, equal pay, paid maternity leave, and, of course, a higher minimum wage.

“Since we’re here at a business school, I thought it might be useful to point out … corporate balance sheets are the strongest, just about, that they’ve ever been. Corporate debt is down, profits are up, businesses are doing good. So this idea that somehow any of these policies, like the minimum wage … or clean energy are somehow bad for business is simply belied by the facts — it’s not true,” Obama said.

The president referenced Thursday’s Bloomberg story juxtaposing corporate criticism of Obama with the health of S&P 500 companies, which are seeing their lowest debt-to-earnings ratio in 24 years.

Obama challenged Republicans to be a “true opposition party” and lay out their own agenda.

“Has anyone seen a credible argument that that is what our economy needs right now? Seriously,” Obama asked of lower taxes on higher incomes.

“Folks are just pontificating … based on what? What’s the data, what’s the proof? If there were any credible argument that says, when those at the top do well, and eventually, everybody else will do well, it would have borne itself out by now. We’d see data that that was true. It’s not,” he said.

Follow @ABCNewsRadio
Copyright 2014 ABC News Radio