"Here’s why Obama should get credit for reducing income inequality"

[FSogol]

By Zachary A. Goldfarb of the Washington Post

My post last week on how President Obama has reduced income inequality sparked a bit of a wonk feud.

MSNBC’s Timothy Noah took me to task, arguing that I was too quick to say that Obama has reduced inequality. He says that inequality has increased under Obama, with the top 1 percent gobbling up 22.46 percent of income in 2012, versus 18.12 percent in 2009, citing the Saez-Piketty World Top Incomes database. New York Magazine’s Annie Lowrey and Vanderbilt professor Larry Bartels also say inequality has increased under Obama, but they agree with me that there is less inequality than there would be without his policies. And Time’s Michael Grunwald suggests that I actually understated how much Obama has done, because I did not capture the full breadth of measures in the stimulus.

This is quite a wonk feud, but like the best wonk feuds, we all actually agree. Yes, the rich have grown farther apart from the rest of us during the Obama years. And yes, Obama’s tax policies and the Affordable Care Act are narrowing inequality to less than it would otherwise be. But the discussion is instructive in that it raises interesting questions about how we experience inequality; how we measure it; and whether we ought to give credit to policymakers -- namely, Obama -- for doing anything about it, or conversely whether we ought to criticize them for failing to do enough about it.

SNIP His 4th point is the best where he states:

The key policies Obama introduced include: higher tax rates on the wealthy, new levies on upper-income Americans in the Affordable Care Act and expanded refundable tax credits for the poor. They also include a more generous program of health insurance for low- and moderate-income Americans, achieved through subsidies and expanded Medicaid.

My selections from the article really don't do it justice. The entire article is here:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/07/28/heres-why-obama-should-get-credit-for-reducing-income-inequality/