National Review nails Obama’s inequality bamboozle

Rather than furthering a program of concrete reforms, the president’s speech was an exercise in theme-building for his upcoming election campaign. That theme apparently is to be inequality. But though it is an economic reality, Americans are not suffering mainly from inequality. They are suffering from unemployment, and suffering worse than the official data communicates: If the millions of Americans who have dropped out of the job market in despair since the election of Barack Obama had not given up hope entirely, the unemployment rate today would be topping 11 percent. It is unemployment that is at the root of the foreclosure crisis — the long-term jobless cannot pay their mortgages — and unemployment that is at the heart of our overall economic weakness. It contributes to the deficit by reducing tax collections and tamps down growth by undermining confidence. President Obama would rather talk about anything than unemployment, and, in Kansas, he indicated that his campaign strategy is to do just that. Americans should not allow themselves to be distracted from the real, fundamental, measurable economic problem before us by the president’s oratory, which is by design disconnected from these unpleasant realities.