The Great Debate

President Barack Obama made the middle class the focus of his State of the Union address on Tuesday. He was lauded by some as fighting for jobs and opportunity, and even for launching a “war on inequality” equivalent to President Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1960s War on Poverty. He was assailed by others for showing his true colors as a man of big government and wealth redistribution.

Yet the initiatives Obama proposed are striking not for their sweep but for their limited scope. That reflects both pragmatism and realism: Not only is the age of big government really over, so is the age of government as the transformative force in American society. And that is all for the best.

Wait a minute, you might reasonably object: What about healthcare? What about the proposals for minimum -wage increases, for expanded preschool, for innovation centers, for $50 billion in spending on roads and infrastructure? Surely those are big government and aim, effectively or not, for transformation?

Healthcare and the changes under the Affordable Care Act are significant, and for now they have expanded the scope and cost of government However, those costs appear to be growing more slowly than expected, at least according to the Congressional Budget Office. While healthcare costs are increasingly untenable, the issue is one of healthcare costs for society as a whole. Recent legislation means government bears more of them, but someone will bear them no matter what.

So while healthcare is billed as an expansion of government, it is more a continuing issue of cost and delivery of something that has to be paid for by someone and at some cost.

This essay is a response to the Reuters special report The Unequal State of America.

Income inequality is a difficult story to get your arms around, and I think Reuters has done a splendid job. I was particularly intrigued to read about the hollowing out of middle-class jobs within the federal government in D.C. I wasn’t aware that the government had so thoroughly followed the private sector’s lead in this regard.

It is important to acknowledge that while government has played an enormous role in creating the trend toward growing income inequality in the U.S., surprisingly little of that role has involved the most obvious ways government affects income distribution, i.e., taxes and benefits. Overall, the federal government redistributes about one-quarter less today than it did in 1979. But the inequality trend is more pronounced when you look at changes in income before taxes and benefits are taken into account. For example, the share of the nation’s income going to the top 1 percent of households more than doubled from 1979 to 2008. For years economists concluded that such findings meant that income inequality was market-driven. But they failed to ask whether government policies might be shaping the course of the market.

During the 2008 campaign, presidential candidate Barack Obama made a pledge to raise the minimum wage to $9.50 per hour by 2011. Promises like this one inspired a generation of young voters, excited long-neglected progressive voters and gave hope to millions of his supporters across the country.

President Obama ran a campaign of soaring rhetoric and uplifting ideas. Amidst two unpopular wars, a rapidly deteriorating financial crisis and the wildly unpopular presidency of George W. Bush, Americans were desperate for a change. He was viewed as a “transformational” candidate, a president who would turn the page on the stagnant politics of Washington.

It is now four years later, and there has been no increase to the minimum wage. There has been no congressional vote, much less a whisper from the White House on the minimum wage.

– Diana Furchtgott-Roth, former chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor, is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. The views expressed are her own. —

As President Obama considers whether to fulfill his campaign promise to raise the minimum wage from $7.25 to $9.50 per hour by 2011, there’s no better illustration of the consequences of well-intentioned policy-making than recent events in American Samoa, a United States territory in the South Pacific that falls within the purview of Congress.

Chicken of the Sea, the tuna company, announced this month that it will close its canning plant in American Samoa in September. The culprit is 2007 legislation in Washington that gradually increased the islands’ minimum wage until it reaches $7.25 an hour in July 2009, almost double the 2007 levels.