The great irony of executive compensation is, if you pay your employees more, you're gonna create more demand for your goods and services! Which is gonna lead to more executive compensation than if you pay your employees less and try to take all the cream off of the top.

There's a ton of stuff we can do to help the economy and help the American people, and the aspirational working class of the American people.

It's better for the United States and better for the world to have the U.S. be energy independent. Have us have clean air and clean water and protect the environment for future generations of Americans. All of that makes sense.

Let me give you really bad news, and I'm sure people will demonize me for saying this: the rich are always gonna be with us. They will always be with us. There are rich people in Cuba. There are rich people in Venezuela. You pick the policies, and the rich are gonna figure it out. They're always gonna be rich.

We know through the process of energy independence, our whole geopolitical footprint changes in terms of our national security and how we operate the American military. In addition to that we've got all these forward liabilities on these entitlement programs that, with the right tax and the energy policy, we can pay down and offset some of those liabilities.

What has worked for America is not caring about how the rich are doing, or the politics of envy. What's worked for America is growth. Growth is the reason why I had a very nice middle class upbringing with parents who never went to college.

I think the president has a very good idea of who the leakers are inside the White House. The president has a very good idea of the people that are undermining his agenda that are serving their own interests.