The income-inequality excuse doesn’t cut it -- By Donald Lambro, The Washington Times

Throughout his economically troubled presidency, Barack Obama has had as a governing strategy political distraction: blaming his failures on others in an attempt to convince enough Americans that he's not at all responsible for an underperforming, jobless economy.

His latest, duplicitous shell game is to raise the issue of income inequality, which he blames on heartless business people and Republican lawmakers who refuse to buy into his dubious, job-killing plan to raise the nation's minimum wage and enact a bundle of new big-spending programs to help the unemployed.

He's trying to shift our attention from the real reasons behind the growing income gap: weak economic growth and the nationwide dearth of full-time jobs. These are the issues he campaigned on in 2008, but now he says it is long-term income inequality — not jobs — that is "the defining challenge of our time."

The liberal news media has bought into his sleight-of-hand sideshow, producing a rash of stories about low-income Americans to prove that his new diagnosis is the right one.

The Washington Post ran a front-page story on Thursday with the ominous headline: "Climbing economic ladder as hard as ever, study finds." It said a group of academics led by a Harvard economist has discovered the real reasons behind "income inequality."

It found that children growing up in the United States today were "just as likely — no more, no less — to climb the economic ladder as children born more than a half century ago."

In short, that study concluded that if you are growing up poor today, "you appear to have the same odds of staying poor in adulthood that your grandparents did."

It was the sort of study that the White House must have been cheering, because it fit right into Mr. Obama's blame-shifting strategy.

Wiser economists who know better, though, say that poverty and lower incomes are the symptoms of the disease that Mr. Obama and the Democrats never talk about: a relentless, subpar, job-cutting, underinvested, overtaxed economy.

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