Let’s not mention inequality

Ramesh Ponnuru

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Republicans think they have found a new weapon to use against President Obama: the charge that income inequality has risen on his watch. In recent weeks that criticism has been lodged by the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell; Speaker of the House John A. Boehner; Representative Paul D. Ryan; and the former governors Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush. Three other potential presidential candidates, Senators Ted Cruz, Rand Paul and Marco Rubio, used inequality to indict the Democrats in a January forum.

“Under President Obama,” Mr. Romney said at the Republican National Committee’s winter meeting, “the rich have gotten richer, income inequality has gotten worse and there are more people in poverty in America than ever before.” We have come a long way since Mr. Romney said that discussions of inequality should be confined to “quiet rooms.”

But Republicans are likely to find that this weapon will be a dud. Inequality does not appear to be an issue that moves voters, and even if it did, Republicans would not be able to come up with an agenda that does much to reduce it.

Polls show that while voters do not like income inequality and think the government should try to reduce it, very few consider it a high-priority issue. In January, a CBS/New York Times poll asked Americans to identify the top issue facing the country. Only 3 percent cited the income gap between the rich and poor — well below the 18 percent who listed the economy and jobs. It’s a finding consistent with many other polls over the years. Last August, the Reason-Rupe poll asked whether Congress should concentrate more on increasing economic growth or reducing income inequality. Growth won, 74 percent to 20 percent.

It’s numbers like these that explain why Mr. Obama, who just over a year ago called inequality “the defining challenge of our time,” has lately stopped emphasizing it. Instead he talks about expanding opportunity and mobility. It appears that most voters care more about whether they, and Americans generally, can get ahead than they care about whether they can keep up with the top 1 percent. More evidence for this set of priorities came in the late 1990s, when inequality was rising but middle-class wages were rising, too. The public at the time expressed satisfaction with the direction of the country.

Before taking up a theme that Mr. Obama has largely abandoned, Republicans should consider whether public opinion gave him good reason to abandon it. They should consider, also, whether they can point to any policy proposals of theirs that would do much about inequality. It’s not an accident that economic equality has been a cause traditionally associated with the left. The Democratic drive to increase tax rates on very high earners and on investment income may or may not be wise, but it would probably reduce inequality. The same cannot be said of Republican proposals.

Republicans deride Mr. Obama’s policies for having yielded insufficient economic growth. But if they had policies more to their liking and those policies had generated higher growth, inequality might well be higher as a result. (It tends to rise during high-growth periods.)

Republicans have a few ideas for fighting poverty and taking on what they call “crony capitalism,” the tendency of government subsidies to enrich moneyed interests. Some are good ideas. Relaxing licensing rules that govern who can become a cosmetologist or start a moving company would expand opportunity, and ending corporate welfare would improve economic efficiency. Neither policy, though, is likely to make a dent in inequality. It would be best to argue for them on other grounds.

Republicans are taking up inequality as an issue now for three reasons. It provides a way of attacking Mr. Obama’s economic record even as unemployment rates drop. It gives them an opportunity to deploy rhetoric usually associated with liberals against him and his party. And Republicans have grown increasingly aware, since their defeat in the 2012 election, that their party has a damaging reputation for caring only about the economic interests of the rich.

But there are better ways for Republicans to signal that their goal is broad-based prosperity. They could, for example, make the case that their policies would combat poverty, expand opportunity and increase middle-class wages — and that Mr. Obama has done a poor job on all these fronts. It would be a debatable case, of course. But it would be more plausible than the case that Republican policies would reduce inequality.

My guess is that Republican politicians almost all care more about raising the middle-class standard of living than about reducing inequality. Since voters do, too, maybe that’s what those politicians should talk about.