Free Republic

Americans who hope for more such “fairness” should be very worried about Obama’s agenda. Yes, it sounds very much like what they want, but if Obama’s presidency has demonstrated anything, it is that he produces results that are the opposite of what he preaches (Exhibit A: Obamacare). Government redistribution designed to reduce income inequality rewards and subsidizes those who are less productive and penalizes the productive. The result is that the ranks of the unproductive swell while those of the wealth-producers shrink. Society gets poorer.

Almost half of likely voters think income inequality is a big problem, said a George Washington University Battleground poll released Wednesday. Forty-nine percent of likely voters call the large gap between the wealthy and the poor a “big problem,” while another 30 percent say it’s “somewhat of a problem.” They’re divided on the right solution though: About half say the best way to fix income inequality is to close the gap between wealthy Americans and the rest of the country while the other half say it’s cutting taxes and loosening regulations.

When President Barack Obama meets Pope Francis in the Vatican in March, both men will speak a common economic language rooted in similar views about poverty and income inequality, giving prominence to an issue that the U.S. president wants to be a central theme of his second term. Obama had an audience with the previous pope, Benedict XVI, in July 2009. At the time, the Vatican underscored the deep disagreement between them on abortion. The (current) pope created a stir in November when he decried trickle-down theories that assert that economic growth can result in greater justice and inclusiveness as...

Target Corp. said Tuesday that it will stop offering health insurance to its part-time employees because new online health exchanges offer workers an opportunity to buy coverage. The Minneapolis-based retailer will give each worker $500 to help buy health insurance, and has arranged for one-on-one consultations with benefits manager Towers Watson to help with the transition. The retailer announced the decision through its online site, “A Bullseye View: Behind the Scenes at Target,” in a Q&A with Jodee Kozlak, Target’s executive vice president of human resources. In the article, Kozlak acknowledged the disruption to workers. But she said the exchanges...

USA Today has the announcement that President Obama will meet with Pope Francis next month, and hopes the Pontiff will prove useful to his political agenda: President Obama will meet with Pope Francis on March 27, capping a European trip that will take him to the Netherlands, Belgium and Italy. "The president looks forward to discussing with Pope Francis their shared commitment to fighting poverty and growing inequality," said a statement from White House press secretary Jay Carney. Sounds like a swell afternoon! Maybe President Obama can show the Pope some photos from his luxury vacations, or his wife's protracted...

On Monday's NBC Nightly News, anchor Brian Williams – who reportedly earned $13 million a year in 2012 – quoted Karl Marx while hyping a new report on global income disparity: "...the staggering news out today about the growing gap between the haves and the have nots." [Listen to the audio or watch the video after the jump] Williams melodramatically recited the findings: "Some new figures came out today....And they are so shocking, it takes a while for them to sink in. A study commissioned by Oxfam says the world's richest 85 individuals have the same wealth as 3.5 billion...

Inequality is President Obama’s highest priority, but his solutions are wholly naive. Disparities between rich and poor are as ancient as civilization, but in modern democracies, this condition is exacerbated by globalization and technologies that drive it. Successive advances in communication and transportation, for example, permit top opera singers, athletes and other professionals to reach wider audiences and earn incomes many times greater than their peers.

Income inequality -- the gap between the rich and poor -- is an issue U.S. presidents of both parties have spoken of for years. President Clinton touted, toward the end of his term, that wages were rising "at all income levels" for the first time in decades. President George W. Bush, toward the end of his, pondered the best way to respond to income inequality, noting some policies "lift people up" and some "tear others down." But perhaps no president has hammered the issue as emphatically as President Obama. In his 2012 State of the Union address, Obama said: "The...

The combined wealth of the world’s richest 85 people is now equivalent to that owned by half of the world’s population—or 3.5 billion of the poorest people—according to a new report from Oxfam. In a report titled “Working for the Few” released Monday, the global aid and development organization detailed the extent of global economic inequality created by the rapidly increasing wealth of the richest, warning of the major risks it poses to “human progress.” […] Oxfam said that based on its polls conducted across the world, it is believed that there are many laws and regulations designed to benefit...

Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), who is worth millions of dollars according to her congressional financial disclosure statement, says Congress needs to tackle income inequality because it “poses an existential threat to our nation and our way of life.” […] According to her congressional financial disclosure statement for 2012, DeLauro is worth between $5 million and $25 million. …

A major peculiarity of Obama's recent promises involving his upcoming "Year of Action" is that the chief enemy he's sworn to overcome is none other than... Barack Obama. Consider "income inequality." As far as this can be said to actually exist, it's a function of certain sectors of the financial industry reaping massive windfalls over the past few years while the rest of the country has stagnated under the burden of the recession. So who is responsible for this state of affairs? Consider the trillion and a half dollars handed over to the banks and other financial institutions shortly after...

President Obama understands the stakes in the midterm elections all too well. If Republicans take back the Senate in November that will give them a stranglehold on both Houses of Congress and ensure that the president will get nothing passed in his final two years in office. The White House is right that even in red states Democrats often prosper by playing the populist card on big business and abuse of the poor. Obama’s proposals for increasing the minimum wage and lengthening unemployment benefits may be economic snake oil, but they poll well everywhere.

In a speech about Obamacare on the floor of the Senate, Ted Cruz made the argument that the president's signature legislation, Obamacare, is causing income inequality in America to worsen: Here's the relevant part of the transcript: The essence of irresponsibility is seeing a harm, seeing the facts and refusing to act. What else do we know? We know that Obamacare is killing jobs all across the country. Indeed, Obamacare is the biggest job killer in this nation.The U.S. Chamber of commerce has said of small businesses impacted by the employer mandate, one half of small businesses say they will...

RICK SANTELLI: We all know that after Friday's jobs report, we know the economy is doing better. What we can't predict is will it be in a straight line, a nice even glide path? Will it be a 25-degree upward glide path, 30-degree, 45-degree or continue to be somewhat bumpy as some of the strength we observed in 2011, with GDP later to be followed by weakness? I can't answer that but what I can answer is that governments can't keep spending like it's 1999. Now, comments made before his first cabinet meeting for 2014, President Obama said the following,...

Whatever the question, politicians have a way of working their issue of the day into the answer. Dem Rep. Keith Ellison took that tendency to new heights today. Asked on Morning Joe to explain the disproportionate amount of terrorism against the United States that emanates from the Islamic world, Ellison, the first Muslim Member of Congress, asserted that it is the struggle for democracy, not the Islamic faith, that motivates the terrorism. In a giant leap, Ellison then compared people in Islamic countries "who don't want to yield power to the vast majority" . . . to the struggle in...

- A college presidents summit with President Obama and first lady Michelle Obama Thursday will seek to expand U.S. educational opportunity, the White House said. The 6-hour event, with leaders from the Ivy League to community colleges, will also include heads of non-profits, foundations, state governments and businesses, the White House said.

Echoing past economic promises of “green shoots,” “five million green collar jobs,” and “recovery summer,” President Barack Obama said during his Saturday weekly address that 2014 will be a “year of action” on the economy. “This will be a year of action. I’ll keep doing everything I can to create new jobs and new opportunities for American families – with Congress, on my own, and with everyone willing to play their part,” said Obama. Obama’s latest economic pivot comes on the heels of a dismal Friday jobs report that shows the U.S. labor force participation rate has contracted to its...

The World Economic Forum says the gap between the rich and the poor is the most likely risk to the global economy in coming years. In its annual risk assessment ahead of next week's gathering of political and business leaders in Davos, Switzerland, the World Economic Forum says income disparity in the wake of the global financial crisis is the "most likely risk to cause an impact on a global scale in the next decade." It warns of a "lost generation" of young people coming of age in the current decade that could hamper the global economic recovery and stoke...

Democrats plan to demagogue income inequality and the wealth gap for political gain in this year's elections. Most of what's said about income inequality is stupid or, at best, ill-informed. Much to their disgrace, economists focusing on measures of income inequality bring little light to the issue. Let's look at it. Income is a result of something. As such, results alone cannot establish whether there is fairness or justice. Take a simple example to make the point. Suppose Tom, Dick and Harry play a weekly game of poker. The result is: Tom wins 75 percent of the time. Dick and...

In 1900, we had no airplanes, no computers, no cellphones, no internet. We had only rudimentary versions of cars, trucks, telephones, even cameras.But in the last century, 1900 to 2000, as Stephen Moore and Julian L. Simon report in their underappreciated work, It’s Getting Better All the Time: 100 Greatest Trends of the Last 100 Years, real per capita GDP in the U.S. grew by nearly 7 times, meaning the American standard of living grew by that much as well. The authors explain,“It is hard for us to imagine, for example, that in 1900 less than one in five homes...