President Obama looks to be going all in with a campaign against economic inequality [View all]
from Sahil Kapur at TPM: http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/01/kruegers-inequality-speech-seals-obamas-2012-inequality-message.php
If a speech Thursday morning by one of his top economists is any indication, President Barack Obama is going all in with the 2012 re-election message of stemming the rise in income inequality and reforming a system that’s increasingly perceived to be rigged in favor of the rich.
White House Council of Economic Advisers Chairman Alan Krueger rattled off a flurry of statistics illustrating the rise of inequality and its connection to the shrinking middle class. He blamed it on economic policies tilted to favor top earners — including income tax reforms (presumably during the Bush era) and the “drastic cut in the estate tax.”
“I think it is clear that we can’t go back to the type of policies that exacerbated the rise in inequality and threatened economic mobility in the first place if we want an economy that builds the middle class,” Krueger told a packed room at the Center for American Progress . . .
Central to the message is that inequalities in the system are “jeopardizing our tradition of equality of opportunity,” as Krueger put it.
“If we had a high degree of income mobility we would be less concerned about the degree of inequality in any given year. But we do not,” he argued. “Moreover, as inequality has increased, evidence suggests that year-to-year or generation-to-generation economic mobility has decreased.”
read more: http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/01/kruegers-inequality-speech-seals-obamas-2012-inequality-message.php
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