Barone: Voters Want Growth, Not Income Redistribution

Conventional wisdom holds that Americans favor big government wealth-redistributionist policies during times of economic distress. At least that's what many of us have been "taught by the great and widely read New Deal historians" — a lesson that "has been absorbed by generations of politicians and political pundits."

But, writes political sage Michael Barone:

I believe that historians have taught the wrong lessons about the 1930s. And I believe there is a plausible and probably correct reason why economic distress has apparently moved Americans to be less rather than more supportive of big government...

Barone analyzes election returns throughout the 1930s to buttress his argument. He also points to a recent Gallup poll confirming that today's voters "realize that they stand to gain much more from a vibrantly growing economy than from redistribution of a stagnant economic pie."

while 82% of Americans think it's extremely or very important to "grow and expand the economy" and 70 percent say it's similarly important to "increase equality of opportunity for people to get ahead," only 46 percent say it's important to "reduce the income and wealth gap between the rich and the poor" and 54 percent say this is only somewhat or not important.
 
In addition, by a 52 to 45 percent margin, Americans see the gap between the rich and the poor as an acceptable part of the economic system rather than a problem that needs to be fixed. In 1998, during the high-tech economic boom, Americans took the opposite view by the same margin.

It turns out that class warfare politics isn't the winner some liberals think, and (as Barone notes) "it hasn't produced a Democratic presidential victory in a long, long time.