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President Barack Obama on Monday, 26 Sept. 2011, was pitching his job-creation at at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., in the heart of Silicon Valley when he received an unusual request from a Google millionaire.
At a town-hall meeting conducted with social-media firm LinkedIn that was dubbed “Putting America Back to Work,” the president promoted his his $447 billion plan to create 1.9 million jobs renovating the nation’s roads, airports and railways.
During the town hall, Obama, whose jobs plan depends on raising taxes on the wealthy, called on “that guy with glasses up in the back row,” according to the San Jose Mercury News. It turned out that guy was a former – and now wealthy – Google brand manager named Doug Edwards, Google employee number 59.
According to the Mercury-News:
Edwards said, “I don’t have a job but that’s because I’ve been lucky enough to live in Silicon Valley and do quite well, so I’m unemployed by choice.”
Then he asked: “Will you please raise my taxes? I would like you to invest in things like Pell grants and job-training programs that made it possible for me to get to where I am.”
Obama ran with it, saying, “America succeeds in large part because of entrepreneurs, which is great.”
But, he said, “We’re successful because others have created great universities” and well-run government programs that help students learn, so “we’ve all benefited from somebody somewhere helping us out.”
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