What Obama Got Right and What He Got Wrong on Economic Mobility
Photo Credit: Reuters
While we don’t promise equal outcomes, we have strived to deliver equal opportunity—the idea that success doesn’t depend on being born into wealth or privilege, it depends on effort and merit.
The idea that a child may never be able to escape that poverty because she lacks a decent education or health care, or a community that views her future as their own, that should offend all of us and it should compel us to action.
But then he spoils it. The President’s speech at the Center for American Progress on Wednesday linked policy prescriptions for increasing economic mobility to reducing income differences in America—as though the opportunity problems facing inner-city kids are somehow because Warren Buffett has a lot of money. But not only do the facts show no link between income inequality and a lack of mobility; focusing on inequality actually distracts from the true causes of low economic mobility.
The President identified several social factors that are essential to upward mobility. “Disparities in education, mental health, obesity, absent fathers, isolation from church, isolation from community groups—these gaps are now as much about growing up rich or poor as they are about anything else.” He’s right about these things. But income redistribution will not fix these.
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