Obama Pivots to Income Inequality
5th December 2013
John Hinderaker points out that the Magic Negro still doesn’t have any clothes.
No one, not even a Democrat, would want to live in a country characterized by income equality. Obama, recognizing this, was quick to say that his concern is equal opportunity, not equality of outcomes. Yet his prescriptions were the same warmed-over liberal wish-list that we have heard in every State of the Union speech. Presumably for the last five years Obama has not been trying to stunt the economic development of the middle class or frustrate economic opportunity, yet that has been, empirically, the effect of his policies. Nowhere in Obama’s speech was there any acknowledgement that his policies have failed, or any willingness to re-think what policies will lead to economic growth and greater opportunity.
This is a large subject, and one to which we will return in the months and years to come. Here are a couple of very basic thoughts. First, If the goal is to enhance the wages of lower-skilled American workers, about whom Obama purports to care so much, there is an easy way to make progress toward that goal: stop importing tens of millions of low-skilled immigrants to compete with them and drive wages down. This is blindingly obvious, and yet Obama refuses to admit that the law of supply and demand applies to labor.