Exposing Rich-versus-Poor Demagoguery -- By James Pethokoukis, National Review

New York City: If a campaign theme can make it there, it can it make it anywhere — or at least in the 2016 U.S. presidential election? Democrat Bill de Blasio won the Big Apple’s mayoralty last week in a historic landslide. His winning campaign was built around a rich vs. poor, “two cities” storyline. In his election-night victory speech, de Blasio described income inequality as “that feeling of a few doing very well, while so many slip further behind” and identified it as “the defining challenge of our time.”

 Team Obama hung Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” comment around the Republican candidate’s neck, but the president didn’t go nearly as far as de Blasio did this year in making inequality his campaign’s raison d’être. Don’t be surprised, however, if a former U.S. senator from New York grabs the inequality baton from the incoming Gotham boss if she makes a White House run. A recent Time magazine analysis highlighted income inequality as one of six potential presidential campaign themes that “Hillary is test driving.” Reporter Zeke Miller noted that in a recent speech at Yale Law School, Clinton said the nation must “reverse this tide of inequality that is eating away at the social fabric of our country.”

Those words are similar to ones found in the mission statement of the Center for Equitable Growth, a new grouped hosted by the Center for American Progress, a think tank whose president was policy director for Hillary Clinton’s failed presidential campaign. Inequality, according to the CEG, “erodes our economy’s ability to function efficiently and at full potential.”

 Any initiatives the group cooks up could be central to candidate Hillary’s presidential policy agenda. But would such an agenda be built upon a distorted premise? Income inequality between middle- and lower-income Americans has not grown for a couple of decades. And while much research suggests inequality between those at the highest end and others has risen sharply, these findings are hardly beyond dispute, and it’s mistaken to conclude the growing gap has led to stagnant incomes for everyone else.

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