Is the President Smoking Weed Again?

By: Erick Erickson (Diary)  |  December 6th, 2013 at 04:30 AM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

The President is either high or ignorant, though perhaps we should embrace the healing power of “and.” He posits that if the nation raises the minimum wage, there will be an economic boom.
Only in leftwing fantasy land and Das Kapital does such a concept even come close to being credible. What’s worse, via his twitter account his minion tweeted out an info graphic making the case. One can only assume this is why he does not want poor children in Louisiana to get a better education. If they did, they’d quickly realize the President is full of . . . choom maybe?
In the land of unicorn farts that powers the Obama Administration — that magical land where the bad thoughts of Republicans can obstruct Obamacare — diverting capital to mandated wage increases can cause an economic boom. But in reality, it does not work that way.
At the same time the President is pushing this, he is also speechifying against inequality. The media has gone gaga over his speech, but here too the President has shown a deep ignorance.
In his speech, the President said,

“A new study shows that 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. The gap in test scores between poor kids and wealthy kids is now nearly twice what it is between white kids and black kids. Kids with working-class parents are 10 times likelier than kids with middle- or upper-class parents to go through a time when their parents have no income. So the fact is this: The opportunity gap in America is now as much about class as it is about race, and that gap is growing.”

As Ben Domenech noted after the speech

Does the president really not realize that he has the causation here completely backwards? He’s spoken eloquently in the past about the dangerous decline of fatherhood among the working class. It’s not that being poor means you’ll have absentee parents, it’s that absentee parents – particularly absentee breadwinners – means you end up poor. Where the middle class and upper class are better insulated from the consequences of the economic pain that comes from family breakups, the poor are not.

Given this President’s position, he has been uniquely qualified to make the case in favor of stable two parent families. Without making that case and without changing the statistics, the long term ability to lift the poor to the middle class will fail. But the President, starting out exactly backwards, has no hope of getting it right.
Of course the President really does not hope to get it right. He is not even serious. These campaigns for an increased minimum wage, coordinated with union activists encouraging fast food workers to strike, along with calls to close the gap in income inequality through speeches, are just designed to turn the media’s attention away from Obamacare.
Make no mistake about it, the President has seen his polling. He wants to distance himself from Obamacare as quickly as he can. The media has just needed an excuse to help him. He is giving the media the excuse. That does not mean Republicans need to play along.
In fact, the GOP needs to point out how President Obama’s healthcare scheme is further exacerbating inequality in the country by creating a multitiered healthcare system where the outcomes depend on just how far removed you can get yourself from Barack Obama’s death panels.