James Pethokoukis writes Obama’s big inequality speech: short on facts and vision in the AEIdeas:

excerpt:

Here’s the bottom line: America’s pro-market turn some three decades ago reversed what then seemed like unstoppable national decline. (Nations that didn’t make that choice, such as Japan and France, have not fared well.) Yes the rich got a lot richer, mostly due to technology and globalization. But the middle-class did pretty well, also. Pre-tax incomes at the bottom end suffered, but the safety net has helped a lot. Inequality has likely increased sharply at the very high end, but has been stable elsewhere along the income distribution spectrum. Mobility could be better, but the big problem is really upward mobility from the very bottom. And America remains the world’s innovation leader.

Obama’s revisionist history and one-sided, black-and-white economic analysis may please his dispirited base, but they won’t help America make the right decisions going going forward about how to boost growth and ensure those economic gains are as broadly shared as possible. Obama makes inequality and mobility just seem like convenient excuses to raise taxes and expand government. By placing those issues within a harshly partisan, left-liberal, progressive framework he makes it harder for right-of-center folks who worry about, say, the effect of automation on the US labor force, to engage in a much-needed policy debate.

HKO

The inequality debate like so many other national issues, is based on preordained conclusions supported by seletive and distorted facts and analysis.  Growing inequality is a convenient supposition to those who wish to believe government is a necessary good rather a necessary evil.

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