Liberals' Inequality Pitch Falls Flat

From WSJ's Kimberley Strassel:

With his disapproval ratings at record highs, his health law flailing, President Obama decided 2014 would be the year for a new agenda. "Inequality has deepened," he warned in the State of the Union. "Upward mobility has stalled." He laid out a roster of populist proposals: more unemployment insurance, raising the federal minimum wage, giving women "equal pay for equal work." The White House and congressional Democrats have since spent every waking minute holding rallies, issuing reports, tweeting and giving interviews on all those issues.

The political calculus is that vulnerable Republicans can be bludgeoned into joining Democrats to support poll-tested and popular pocketbook issues—thereby changing the political subject and rallying the Democratic base. ...

It isn't working this time—at least not yet. The Republican response to date has been a united and calm refusal to fold.

Stephens: Obama's Envy Problem

"As he came to the end of his awful year Barack Obama gave an awful speech," writes Bret Stephens at the Wall Street Journal. "The president thinks America has inequality issues. What it has—what he has—is an envy problem."

In 1835 Alexis de Tocqueville noticed what might be called the paradox of equality: As social conditions become more equal, the more people resent the inequalities that remain.

"Democratic institutions awaken and foster a passion for equality which they can never entirely satisfy," Tocqueville wrote. "This complete equality eludes the grasp of the people at the very moment they think they have grasped it . . . the people are excited in the pursuit of an advantage, which is more precious because it is not sufficiently remote to be unknown or sufficiently near to be enjoyed."

One result: "Democratic institutions strongly tend to promote the feeling of envy." Another: "A depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom."

That is the background by which the current hand-wringing over inequality must be judged. Inequality is not a problem simply because the rich get richer faster than the poor get richer. It's a problem only when the rich get richer at the expense of the poor [emphasis added].

Stephens argues that Mr. Obama's numbers (comparing present-day income with that of 1979) are simply wrong: