from Jeff Jacoby in Townhall, Income Gap? Not Many are Obsessed
Excerpts:
How many shared Obama’s view that the gap between rich and poor is the issue that should concern us most? Four percent.
Obsessing over other people’s riches isn’t healthy. In a relatively free society, wealth is typically earned. There are exceptions, of course. Some people cheat their way to a fortune; some are just lucky; some pull political strings.
But on the whole, Americans with a lot of money have usually produced more, worked harder, aimed higher, or seen further than the rest of us. Inequality is built into the human condition, and the world is generally better off when people of uncommon talent and industry are free to climb as high as their abilities will take them.
If income inequality were off the charts and upward mobility were now a thing of the past, the president’s claim that this is the “defining challenge of our time” might be more convincing. That isn’t what the data show.
According to a 2010 Congressional Budget Office report, income inequality stands only slightly higher now than the average of the past 30 years. And as the Tax Foundation notes, there is less inequality today (as measured by income) than during Bill Clinton’s last two years in the White House, since peaks have usually occurred during times when the economy was booming.
To be sure, it has grown harder under this administration to climb up from the lowest quintile. But that has little to do with the “millionaires and billionaires” the left so often vilifies. It has much more to do with government policies that have undermined work incentives, increased dependency, and priced the low-skilled unemployed out of the labor market.
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