In his speech on economic inequality in early December 2013 and his recruitment of John Podesta as a senior advisor, President Obama signaled his strategy pivot to change the conversation from ObamaCare, Benghazi, the IRS, etc., to one of class warfare. I read the speech in its entirety and it is right out of Herbert Croly’s progressive bible of 1909, The Promise of American Life, the foundational elements of which, thankfully, were rejected by the American people, in spite of the fact that many of its programs were adopted by the New Deal and the Great Society initiatives.
The sentiment of envy has never been a winning issue in America, because it is antithetical to the American character and ideal, but demagogues over the years have continued to pursue it, most out of desperation in search of a winning political formula. But this is the first President in my memory to resort to such a strategic focus as the organizing principle of a second term, along with the threat of using “a pen and a phone” to circumvent Congress and the Constitution in its implementation.
Here is what Alexis de Tocqueville had to say about inequality in 1835: “Democratic institutions awaken and foster a passion for equality which they can never entirely satisfy…………{resulting in} a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom”. Obama would violate over two centuries of American sensibilities on this tradeoff.
Moreover, much of the recent growth in inequality of incomes in the U. S. has been on Obama’s watch and the result of his policies. The median income of the poorest 20% of Americans has declined in absolute terms from the height of the recession in 2009 to 2012. And the monetary policy of the Federal Reserve has distorted capital flows to the benefit of the upper income brackets. Further, now we have the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office report that the medical insurance subsidies provided to low income brackets in ObamaCare will discourage work and result in job losses of 2.5 million over the next ten years. Finally, unemployment rates are slowly declining, but primarily because of declines in workforce participation rates, and the current rate of 7%, if adjusted for this participation decline since 2008, would be 11.3%!
So the demagogic appeal to class warfare and envy is badly misguided and does a disservice to those most in need of policies that will promote economic growth. We know what those are, but we are unlikely to find any willingness to have a meaningful discussion on them with this administration, particularly since their turn to the hard left.
