In his New Hampshire primary victory speech Tuesday night, Mitt Romney said, “President Obama wants to put free enterprise on trial. In the last few days, we have seen some desperate Republicans join forces with him. This is such a mistake for our party and for our nation. This country already has a leader who divides us with the bitter politics of envy.” The next day, “Today Show” host Matt Lauer challenged Romney on this point. “Did you suggest that anyone who questions the policies and practices of Wall Street and financial institutions, anyone who has questions about the distribution of wealth and power in this country, is envious? Is it about jealousy, or fairness?” Lauer asked. Romney stood his ground. “You know, I think it’s about envy. I think it’s about class warfare. When you have a president encouraging the idea of dividing America based on 99 percent versus one percent, and those people who have been most successful will be in the one percent, you have opened up a wave of approach in this country which is entirely inconsistent with the concept of one nation under God.”
Liberals like Lauer may not like to hear that Obama is sowing envy and class warfare by attacking capitalism, but two new polls from the Pew Research Center show that is exactly what is going on. Two weeks ago, Pew released a poll showing that support for capitalism has fallen since Obama began promoting the issue of income inequality. Not only that, but most people in three demographics highly supportive of Obama (the young, liberals, and African-Americans) told Pew they now support socialism. Except for blacks, that was not true before Obama was elected.
Now this week, Pew has released a different poll showing growing numbers of Americans believe there are deep conflicts between rich and poor. Overall, 66 percent of Americans now say there are “very strong” or “strong” conflicts between the rich and poor, a 19 point increase since 2009. Pew also asked people how the rich obtained their wealth and found that, while 46 percent said they did it via connections and birth, 43 percent said the rich got there through hard work. Digging deeper into its data, Pew found that people who believe the rich didn’t earn their wealth were more likely to see strong conflicts between rich and poor people than those who thought they earned it.
Ira Ellis, one of Pew’s respondents, connected the dots, “I think you see very, very rich people, and there is a jealousy there by the people on the other end, the poor side. … It’s worse than it’s ever been.” In fact, Internal Revenue Service data crunched by University of Chicago professor Steven Kaplan shows that incomes of the top 1 percent have declined much more than those of the rest of the population as a result of the Great Recession of 2008. The biggest difference is that there is now a president in the White House who has failed to bring the prosperity and jobs he promised and is now desperate to change the conversation, even if it divides the country.
