Inequality and this Presidency – A Bad Joke!

  Sometimes I think we are living a dream and a bad joke is being perpetrated on the American public and we will soon wake up and everything will be fine again. We have this President who keeps telling us that inequality in this country is our defining challenge and a moral disgrace. Not only is this blasphemy, because he runs his office as if he were our King and his crony capitalism favors all his benefactors, it also is misguided. An excellent op-ed article in today’s WSJ by Robert Grady entitled, Obama’s Misguided Obsession with Inequality, illustrates how he uses snippets of statistics that are incomplete and out of context to drive home an unsubstantiated point. He is a master of this and has done it for most of his political life.

This President tells us that “the deck is stacked against the middle class no matter how hard we work” and that future children will never escape poverty because “they will lack a decent education, healthcare, or a community that views their future as their own”. Who is he talking about, the Detroit ghetto? As Mr. Grady points out, Obama uses census income data that fails to include taxes, transfer payments, like Medicaid, Medicare, nutrition assistance, earned income tax credits, and employee benefits like health insurance. When you take this into account inequality actually declined 1.8% during the 16-year period between 1993 and 2009.

In addition, he neglects to tell you that recent (2011) studies at Columbia and the Congressional Budget Office showed that family income, including benefits, experienced a 62% gain above inflation from 1979 to 2007 and all 5 levels of the income distribution spectrum had real gains in family income. Since he became President the reverse has happened. The defining challenge for us Mr. President, is not income inequality but economic growth!

It’s obvious that income equality is a rather fruitless goal, nowhere in the world do we have it nor will any political system ever achieve it. Even in communist and socialist societies, which profess to aspire to it, income inequality is even more rampart and infested with graft and corruption. Since your income depends upon many factors related to your own desires and skills or factors that you cannot control, income equality is not a realistic objective. However, in a free market system with solid economic growth, we all benefit. We have proven that in the U.S. where even the most poor among us are taken care of better than anywhere in the world.

And now this President is striving for healthcare equality with a law that ignores the free market and inserts bureaucrats between the doctor- patient relationship and in fact dissolves that relationship by government decree. The law is so bad that he is actually revising it as it is being implemented, something our Constitution, which he swore to uphold, prevents him from doing. A law in which he misled and lied to us in order to get re-elected. A law in which he actually repealed the other day when he suspended the individual mandate for specific “hardship” cases who could not get insurance that met the requirements of Obamacare.

This has got to be a joke. I hope I wake up soon!