In 2008, Obama infamously said on the campaign trail that he wanted to “spread the wealth around.” Yet for some reason, nothing he did actually solved the problem of income inequality. In fact, nothing he did even made it better.
Income inequality got worse on Obama’s watch. The Pew Research Center, citing the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances, found that in 2013, the median net worth of the wealthy was 6.6 times larger than the median income — a larger gap than before the 2007 recession, when it was 4.5 times as large. Prior to Obama, the largest wealth gap was 5.0
Later that year, Obama declared that income inequality and the alleged lack of upward mobility in America was “the defining challenge of our time,” and he insisted it was the government’s responsibility to close the gap between the rich and the poor — completely ignoring the fact that his policies clearly exasperated the problem. But that didn’t stop the Democrats from making income inequality another one of their pet causes.
Yet despite the left’s alleged antipathy for income inequality, not only are they generally not very charitable, but the more liberal a state is the more prevalent income inequality is.
The Daily Wire looked at the states where one party controlled both the legislature and the governor’s mansion and ranked them according to the percentage of state legislature seats that were held by each party in order to determine the ten most liberal states (excluding Hawaii, because it’s not part of the mainland and has unique economic conditions) and the ten most conservative states.
“That left Rhode Island, with an 87%-Democrat legislature, as the most Democratic state, followed by California, New York, and Delaware. The most conservative state was South Dakota, with a 90%-Republican legislature, followed by Wyoming, North Dakota, and Idaho.”
The Daily Wire analyst found that “New York, Connecticut, and California had the biggest gulf between rich and poor,” while “Utah, Indiana, and South Dakota had the least inequality.”
Gaps also appear when looking at income inequality by race. “When it comes to median income, Rhode Island, New York, and Connecticut had the largest gap between whites and Hispanics. Six of the 10 blue states had larger gaps between foreign-born residents and whites than every red state.”
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In California, the average non-native-born resident had a salary that was only a third of what native-born Californians made. But if you head over to the red state of Idaho, the average black resident made 85% as much as the average white person — making it the most racially equitable state in the nation. In Indiana, another red state, Hispanics made close to 90% of what whites did in terms of income.
Gee, how is that possible? I thought the left hates income inequality.
“This shows that all of the things that [Democrats] complain about actually come from Democrat policies,” David Gordon, a conservative political consultant, told the Daily Wire. “When they complain about poor outcomes for blacks, for example, that is primarily in the areas where they have governed for generations, to catastrophic effect.”
The findings beg the question: Why is it that Democrats, who profess such disdain for income inequality, have the worst records in dealing with it? Perhaps it’s because income inequality is a feature, not a bug, of left-wing policies. Democrats need their constituents to feel like victims but never actually improve their lives. And the data proves that’s what they get.
