OPINION:
Snarky attacks on Wall Street, wealthy investors, bankers and other favorite liberal targets have become the soup of the day. President Obama’s “income inequality” has replaced the “war on women” as his second-term mantra, but the inequality is from Mr. Obama’s own kitchen.
The Obama stock market is soaring. Wall Street and private investors are reaping record returns on their investments, while seniors and ordinary Americans with no millions to invest see their savings and the return on their investments dwindle as interest rates are held unrealistically low.
The income gap between ordinary Americans and the very wealthy has indeed been growing.
But that gap has accelerated under the president who denounces those who profit from his policies, puts an arm on them for campaign contributions and appoints them to high office.
It’s Chicago politics writ large.
The income gap didn’t begin with Mr. Obama, but it deepened as he bailed out big banks and investors. For his wealthy friends and golfing buddies, the Obama stimulus worked.
For the rest of us, not so much.
In the new world of government-directed capitalism, friends of Mr. Obama have long since recovered from the recession. The rest of us haven’t been so fortunate.
Companies with ties to the administration get government subsidies and contracts, and retailers on Main Street and in the suburban malls get the bill for Obamacare, job-killing regulatory requirements and orders to pay higher-than-market wages.
No one should be surprised. Crony capitalism redistributes the wealth to friends of those in power. Rewards to the politically connected at the expense of everybody else is the way of the corrupt world, whether capitalist, Marxist or something between.
Learned study after learned study of the old Soviet Union demonstrated that “income inequality” was as great there, and sometimes greater, than in the free-market West. The difference was that the riches went to apparatchiks and party favorites, not entrepreneurs and job creators.
That’s why the wolves of Wall Street line up behind a president who sneers at them in public, but protects them with action.
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