That's great. Now put up or shut up.
Hmm. The headline here is "
Talk of Wealth Gap Prods the G.O.P. to Refocus," but color me skeptical that the the refocusing is anything but a coat of paint over the same carnival ride.
Mitt Romney, vowing a campaign to “end the scourge of poverty” if he runs for president a third time, has backed raising the minimum wage over the wishes of congressional leaders.
Similarly, Jeb Bush’s new “super PAC,” announced with the fanfare of a presidential declaration, proclaimed, “While the last eight years have been pretty good ones for top earners, they’ve been a lost decade for the rest of America.”
At a closed-door retreat last week, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the new majority leader, encouraged the Republican troops to refocus policy on the stagnant middle class.
What we can glean from this is that the wealth gap is so obvious that even the candidates of the wealthy and connected cannot ignore it or insult it away with whines of "class warfare" or "attacking the rich." Yes, the gap between the rich and the rest of America, specifically the once-dominant but now much-diminished middle class, is a real thing. And yes, the "rest of America" is keenly aware of it.
What has not happened, however, is any policy shifts whatsoever on the part of those whose policies so quickly and efficiently created that economic gap. Mitt Romney shifting from a campaign against the 47 percent of America that just wants free stuff to a campaign to "end poverty" is, to put it mildly, implausible—and if he can pull off such a dramatic shift of focus, it serves as little more than a reminder that Romney has never clearly been able to elucidate just why he wants to be president, from a policy perspective, only that he personally wants the job and so therefore should have it.
An equally implausible champion of the middle class, Jeb Bush comes from the family and, more importantly, the movement that presided personally over the destruction of the middle class and whose tax policies can be cited as one of the primary weapons used by the wealthy to detach themselves from the national good; it will be no great surprise if his proposed solutions to the problem consist of further tax cuts to the rich in service of trickle-down economics, or further destruction of whatever thin regulations still encumber the Wall Street casinos under the banner of wealth creation, or a program to encourage The Poors to get married so that they can share incomes and stop living in sin. The policies that carved out the gap between rich and poor were plotted out in part at his family's own dinner table; we should at least be entitled to a description of just what the former governor feels went wrong in those previous plans.
And as recently as This Exact Precise Unique Moment, Sen. Mitch McConnell's most substantive and self-lauded plan for creating American jobs consists of building a single Canadian pipeline to export Canadian oil through our southern ports, which will do about as much to lift up the middle and poorer classes as the government presenting them all with coupons for two percent off their next yacht purchase.
The point here is that while the much-decayed opportunities of every single American who is not personally rich is too obvious for even the Mitt Romneys to pooh-pooh away anymore, each of the people seeking to recast themselves as giving a damn about it are among those most responsible for the creation of that gap in the first place. Wall Street manipulations that devour or destroy companies for the sake of momentary gain; deregulation targeted toward allowing more efficient economic manipulations by a set of preferred, very large, very very wealthy actors; actions by Congress geared specifically toward greasing individual pet projects by wealthy benefactors; tax policies specifically intended to reduce tax payments by the ultra-rich to near-zero by collecting more from the lower classes. This is the rogue's gallery of the worst enemies of the middle class, all now braying that they have gotten the message and will solve the problem by advocating for the precise same policies but this time with a new "compassionate" binder cover. It is implausible. And it is, to be blunt, goddamn insulting.
So we should be eager to see just how this newfound concern for rampant income inequality and the dismantling of the middle class plays out in actual policies—as in, whether any of those that now suppose themselves champions of that middle class can or does elucidate any reversal of any policy position they held when they were declaring that same economic phenomenon a myth and an insult to their campaign benefactors. Given that each of the mentioned individuals have expressed keen interest in revoking even the marginal improvements of healthcare policy many in the not-wealthy classes have been granted over the last half decade, I would advise against anyone holding their breath.