President Obama, and even more so his lapdogs in the press, have been beating the dead horse about income inequality for weeks now. Anything to distract from his truly breathtaking array of scandals, errors in judgment, carelessness, obfuscation, dishonesty, free speech suppression, and radical leftist policies. In his State of the Union, Obama decried income gaps, despite the fact that income disparity has grown dramatically under his careless watch. Charles Krauthammer points out the inanity of Obama campaigning against the results of his own Presidency.
If you listen to what markets were saying today, they went up. It was not because of joy about a recovery, about a drop in the unemployment rate, it was, as you say, really an artifact. It’s joy at the fact — and this is a perverse way of looking at but this is how it works — if the economy weakens, which is what this is implying, that means that the Fed is less likely to taper off the stimulus.
So it’s more likely, particularly under Janet Yellen, who is more of a money printer than her predecessor, so more likely to print more money to stop the tapering, and that means pumping all the money, which would raise the value of assets. Houses and stocks. So the markets are going up, in a perverse way.
I think it’s right, what Bill is saying, this really is only helping the rich. What you have is a president who campaigns on income inequality and has absolutely no answer to what to do about it other than to raise the minimum wage, which is not going to have any effect on closing the gap, and then his own administration, over half a decade, has absolutely increased the disparity of wealth between the rich and the poor, and here he is campaigning against the results of his own presidency.
(via RCP)