AUDIENCE MEMBER ASKS OBAMA: ‘WOULD YOU PLEASE RAISE MY TAXES?’

President Obama is currently fielding questions from a town hall audience in Mountain View, California, hosted by LinkedIn. At one point, a man stood and asked Obama, “Would you please raise my taxes?” He continued: “I would like very much to have the country to continue to invest in things like Pell Grants, infrastructure, and job training programs that made it possible for me to get to where I am.” In his response, Obama dismissed “class warfare” rhetoric and emphasized that everyone benefits from government investments that companies would not have made on their own. Watch it:

After Obama spoke, the man — who said he is voluntarily unemployed after making a healthy return from investing years ago in a search engine start-up company (presumably Google) — pleaded with Obama: “Please!” “We’re gonna get to work,” Obama concluded.

UPDATE

Mark Knoller tweets, “The man who asked Pres Obama to raise his taxes was Doug Edwards, former Dir of Consumer Marketing & brand management for Google.”

UPDATE

In a recent interview, Edwards — author of “I’m Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59″ — said, “It’s hard to see how real change is gonna come when money is still the largest voice in politics.”