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Sen. Sessions: Immigration Spikes Income Inequality

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Photo Credit: Jacquelyn Martin, AP

Photo Credit: Jacquelyn Martin, AP

In Tuesday’s State of the Union address, President Obama is expected to discuss the plight of American workers. At the same time, he is pushing Republicans to pass an immigration plan making the problem worse by increasing the flow of immigrant workers to compete against unemployed Americans and those struggling to get by in low-wage jobs. Yet, alarmingly, the move is regarded as a part of Obama’s agenda that has a chance of becoming law.

House Republicans should reply to the president’s immigration effort with a simple message: Our first duty is to help struggling Americans find good work and rising wages.

The president’s own economic adviser, Gene Sperling, recently noted that there are three unemployed people for every job available. Wages today have been flat since 2000. Last year, a record one in five American households received food stamps.

This is a national emergency.

So what is the president’s proposal? With three job seekers for every open job, he proposes doubling the number of guest workers entering every year, granting immediate work permits to millions of illegal immigrants, and tripling the number of new immigrants granted permanent residency over the next decade.

Today, the U.S. admits 1 million immigrants a year. The plan supported by the president and Senate Democrats would increase that to 3 million a year, or 30 million largely lower-skill immigrants over the next 10.

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Obama’s Policies Make Income Inequality a Lot Worse

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Income inequality has been growing since the 1970s, but President Obama’s economic policies are making it worse and making it grow much faster than did either Presidents Bush or Clinton.

Globalization is driving the sinking fortunes of many ordinary Americans.

Prior to World War II, the U.S. economy was largely isolated. It traded with the world much less than did rivals like Germany because labor was scarcer and wages were higher for ordinary workers than just about anyplace else.

The New Deal strengthened unions and the post-war growth of manufacturing created a thriving middle class. Competition for workers tended to raise wages in service activities too.

Subsequently, the United States championed freer trade through the World Trade Organization. Cheaper ocean freight, then jet travel and now the Internet blurred boundaries between national markets. Combined with the rise of Japan and China, those severely injured U.S. electronics, auto and other manufacturing are now eroding employment in many professional services.

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Millionaire Congresswoman: Income Inequality is ‘Existential Threat’ to U.S. (+video)

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), who is worth millions of dollars according to her congressional financial disclosure statement, says Congress needs to tackle income inequality because it “poses an existential threat to our nation and our way of life.”

On the House floor last Wednesday DeLauro said, “Every generation of leaders in this institution has faced their own time of testing. Whether it’s an economic panic, Great Depression, slavery, Jim Crow, Civil War, World War, Cold War. There are times when our country is confronted with a crisis that poses an existential threat to our nation and our way of life and Congress needs to stand up and act.”

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Cruz: Obama’s Policies Worsen Income Inequality (+video)

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Photo Credit: Reuters

Photo Credit: Reuters

In a speech about Obamacare on the floor of the Senate, Ted Cruz made the argument that the president’s signature legislation, Obamacare, is causing income inequality in America to worsen:

The essence of irresponsibility is seeing a harm, seeing the facts and refusing to act. What else do we know? We know that Obamacare is killing jobs all across the country. Indeed, Obamacare is the biggest job killer in this nation.

The U.S. Chamber of commerce has said of small businesses impacted by the employer mandate, one half of small businesses say they will either cut hours to reduce full-time employees or replace full-time employees with part-time workers to avoid the mandate.

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Income Inequality: Obama Owes You $19,000

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Photo Credit: REUTERS/Larry Downing

Photo Credit: REUTERS/Larry Downing

Democratic leaders have signaled their intention to make income inequality the centerpiece of the midterm elections, and expanding benefit programs for the poor and unemployed are at the heart of the strategy. As the ever-gracious senior senator from New York, Chuck Schumer, put it, if the GOP opposes extension of long-term unemployment benefits, “it’s going to hurt them in the election.”

Now Democratic leaders are hard at work flogging the income inequality issue while refusing to come up with $6.4 billion to extend unemployment benefits. Clearly, they do not want the benefits extended. They would rather have a provocative issue to use against Republicans in the fall.

It’s possible, however, that income inequality could turn out to be a big mistake for them. Maybe Americans aren’t dumb enough to fall for wealth envy ruse again. Maybe they’re ready to grow up and realize that Bill Gates and Warren Buffett will always make more than most people. The real problem is the difference between what they should be earning, based on wage growth during previous recoveries, and they’re earning under Obama. Who’s responsible for that? Not Bill Gates or Warren Buffett.

In the past, as in the 2008 campaign, Obama liked to compare himself to Ronald Reagan. That was always laughable, but since the President brought it up, how does he compare with Reagan in terms of wage growth?

The Social Security Administration’s national average wage index shows that earnings of US workers rose by a cumulative 7.2% during Obama’s first term (from $41,334 to $44,321 between 2008 and the end of 2012). During Reagan’s first term, wages rose 29% (from $12,513 to $16,135), and they went on to rise to $19,334 by the end of his second term (a total of 54.5%). That difference is the source of much of today’s discontent over income inequality.

The real “inequality,” in other words, is between what workers are now getting (an average of $44,321) and what they would have been getting ($53,321) if the economy had been growing as it did under Reagan.

The contrast is magnified over time. By the end of Obama’s second term, average wages are likely to be close to $47,500. Applying the growth trajectory of Reagan’s second term, average wages would be $66,634. Personally, I would rather have the $66,634, and most Americans would as well.

By 2016 Obama’s experiment in socialism will have cost US workers over $19,000 per year in lost wages. And Obama’s party is just getting started. If succeeded by another left-wing president, presumably Hillary Clinton, the lost wages will continue to compound.

It doesn’t really matter how much less than Warren Buffett you are making if you don’t have enough to get your kids through school and save for retirement. It does matter if you’re making less than you should be as a result of government policies that restrict growth.

Not many of us will make it into the 1% so it doesn’t matter how much they make. What matters is how much we make. And Obama has seen to it that average Americans will be making $19,000 less than they should be. Income inequality is only a hot-button issue because, under Obama, incomes have become more unequal.

Stagnant wage growth is bad enough, but, remarkably, Obama is the first president in American history to have frozen job growth during his first term in office. According to the World Bank, the US labor force has grown by a statistically insignificant .005% between January 2009 and the end of 2012. Even the less prosperous nation of Chile managed job growth of 11.5% during the same period. Why was job growth in the US so far behind that of Chile? It was because Chile embraced the free market under a conservative president while America chose socialism.

Conservatives want something better for all Americans. They want the poor to dream big, along with everyone else. They celebrate stories like that of Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle Corporation, whose $41 billion puts him third on the list of America’s wealthiest citizens. Ellison began life as the adopted son of a family of modest means. He worked hard and earned every penny he made, but America gave him the chance.

That kind of opportunity, the chance to found a small company and see it grow into a major enterprise, has been wrecked by the Obama administration and Democrats in Congress. It is Republicans who want to make it possible once again.

Conservatives have a time-tested plan for attacking income inequality. They want Americans to have the chance to work and prosper, to start small businesses, and to see their wages grow by 54% and more. That message will resonate in 2014. But only if conservatives start to talk about the real “income inequality” in America—the inequality between what Americans are making today and what they would be making without Democrats in power.

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Jeffrey Folks is the author of many books on American politics and culture, including Heartland of the Imagination (2011). He can be contacted at [email protected].

Millionaire Obama: I Hate Income Inequality

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Photo Credit: SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty

Photo Credit: SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty

Back from his $4 million Hawaii vacation, President Barack Obama seems poised to sound the populist trumpet in an effort to turn the page on 2013’s disastrous Obamacare rollout.

Many pundits are speculating that Obama, seeing the popularity of liberal populists like New York City Mayor Bill DeBlasio, will use the current debate over unemployment insurance to engage in more divisive rhetoric:

The Obama administration has set the stage for a push that could rekindle cries of class warfare — calling for renewed long-term unemployment benefits, a minimum wage increase and a campaign against what Democrats call “income inequality.”

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Dems Believe Income Inequality To Be Winning Issue In November

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Democrats aren’t wasting any time tackling an issue they are convinced will help them this election year: income inequality.

One of the Senate’s first votes upon returning to Washington from its holiday break Monday will be on a bill reviving emergency unemployment benefits that lapsed at the end of 2013.

The vote marks the first concrete step by Democrats toward a populist economic platform ahead of the November elections. The inequality campaign will intensify later in the year with a push in the Senate to raise the federal minimum wage that will be synced with President Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech, which is expected to dig heavily into the issue of economic disparity.

The focus on income inequality builds on the economic themes Obama successfully harnessed to beat Mitt Romney in 2012. Democrats believe they can win again by spotlighting the growing divides between the rich and poor and daring Republicans to oppose legislation aimed at benefiting low-income Americans.

“Our Republican colleagues should take note. Certainly we’re going to build on the progress we’ve made to reduce the deficit, but it is no longer the most important issue that we face,” Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said in laying out Senate Democrats’ agenda for the coming year. “Issues like job creation, minimum wage and unemployment insurance are going to weigh on the minds of voters far more than Obamacare by the time the 2014 elections roll around.”

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5 Ways the Liberal Obsession With Income Inequality Hurts the Poor

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Photo Credit: Townhall

Photo Credit: Townhall

After the last century, it shouldn’t even be controversial to assert that the more a nation focuses on income inequality, the more it hurts the poor. After all, there have been whole societies formed around the slogan Marx popularized, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need” — and they’ve universally been lousy places to be poor. Would you rather be poor in America or Cuba, Vietnam or the old Soviet Union? If the question doesn’t answer itself, P.J. O’Rourke’s quotation about traveling to the Soviet Union with a gang of Communists should answer it for you, “These were people who believed everything about the Soviet Union was perfect, but they were bringing their own toilet paper.” Meanwhile, we live in a world where China has seen tremendous economic growth by embracing some of the capitalistic policies that made America a superpower while the Democrats are embracing some of the policies that led to hundreds of millions of Chinese living in huts on less than a dollar a day…

What liberals don’t realize or alternately, just don’t care about, is that their obsession with income inequality may make them feel good, but it actually hurts the poor in a number of ways.

1) The higher the government mandated minimum wage/living wage, the more people it prices out of jobs: When you force businesses to pay people more than they can return in value with their work, companies tend to respond either by hiring better quality people, replacing the jobs with automation, moving the posts overseas or by looking for opportunities to get rid of the positions entirely. The higher the wages and benefits the government insists on, the more stagnant it makes the labor market for the people who need to build their skills the most. If your goal were to deliberately put as many young, unskilled single mothers out of work as possible, the best politically feasible way to do it would be to jack the minimum wage up into the stratosphere.

2) It emphasizes making people more comfortable, not helping them succeed: There is no shame in taking any honest job, but you’re not supposed to make a living pressing the button that drops the fries into the grease at McDonald’s. If you work long enough at an entry level job to worry about raising the minimum wage, you’re failing your family, your society and yourself. Instead of encouraging minimum skill workers to demand that the government force businesses to give them more money than they’re currently worth, we should be encouraging people to build their skills and move up, move on or start their own business. Want poor people to be eligible for more education or training? Want to give them micro-loans? Want to make it easier for them to create small businesses? Those are policies that make poor Americans more valuable. That’s good for them and the country. On the other hand, trying to redistribute income ultimately brings everyone down, especially the poor Americans who lose their drive after becoming dependent on it.

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Obama wants to kill the suburbs. Really.

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Photo credit: jdnx

Obama’s plans to undercut the political and economic independence of America’s suburbs reach back decades. The community organizers who trained him in the mid-1980s blamed the plight of cities on taxpayer “flight” to suburbia. Beginning in the mid-1990s, Obama’s mentors at the Gamaliel Foundation (a community-organizing network Obama helped found) formally dedicated their efforts to the budding fight against suburban “sprawl.” From his positions on the boards of a couple of left-leaning Chicago foundations, Obama channeled substantial financial support to these efforts. On entering politics, he served as a dedicated ally of his mentors’ anti-suburban activism.

The alliance endures. One of Obama’s original trainers, Mike Kruglik, has hived off a new organization called Building One America, which continues Gamaliel’s anti-suburban crusade under another name. Kruglik and his close allies, David Rusk and Myron Orfield, intellectual leaders of the “anti-sprawl” movement, have been quietly working with the Obama administration for years on an ambitious program of social reform.

In July of 2011, Kruglik’s Building One America held a conference at the White House. Orfield and Rusk made presentations, and afterwards Kruglik personally met with the president in the Oval Office. The ultimate goal of the movement led by Kruglik, Rusk, and Orfield is quite literally to abolish the suburbs. Knowing that this could never happen through outright annexation by nearby cities, they’ve developed ways to coax suburbs to slowly forfeit their independence.

One approach is to force suburban residents into densely packed cities by blocking development on the outskirts of metropolitan areas, and by discouraging driving with a blizzard of taxes, fees, and regulations. Step two is to move the poor out of cities by imposing low-income-housing quotas on development in middle-class suburbs. Step three is to export the controversial “regional tax-base sharing” scheme currently in place in the Minneapolis–St. Paul area to the rest of the country. Under this program, a portion of suburban tax money flows into a common regional pot, which is then effectively redistributed to urban, and a few less well-off “inner-ring” suburban, municipalities.

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