The Fight Over Inequality

By THOMAS B. EDSALL
NYT

The headline promised an article of critical importance: “Obama’s inequality argument just utterly collapsed.”

James Pethokoukis, a conservative columnist and blogger at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote on April 11 that a new academic study put the lie to Democratic claims of endemic inequality and grotesquely distorted income gains by the top 1 percent. The “tax and regulatory policies of the past three decades,” he wrote,

did not lead to stagnation for the middle class at the hands of the rapacious rich. Claims to the contrary — such as those made by Obama, the Occupy movement, and many liberal economists — never really passed the sniff test of anyone who lived through the past few decades. And now we know why: The inequality and stagnation alarmists were wrong. And so, therefore, is the economic rationale of the president’s class-warfare economic policies. 

Pethokoukis’s claim is based on the findings of three scholars: Richard V. Burkhauser, an economist at Cornell; Jeff Larrimore, an economist on the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation; and Kosali I. Simon, a professor at the Indiana University School of Public and Environmental Affairs.

Pethokoukis is a hard-core adversary of the current administration. His recently filed contributions include: “Obama’s government by gimmick: His 7 most meaningless policy gestures,” “More unintended consequences of Obamacare,” “Just how high does Obama think taxes should go? 70%? 80%? 90%?,” “The total intellectual collapse of Obama’s Buffett Rule” and “Why pretty much everything Obama is saying about income stagnation and inequality is wrong.”

(More here.)