A rebuttal.
Scoring the obama administration's record on inequalityBy Ezra Klein
So is Jacob Weisberg right to say that "if Obama has declared war on inequality, inequality seems to be winning"? Here's the scorecard, I think:
The stimulus (and subsequent extensions of its components, like unemployment insurance): Major downward redistribution. The Making Work Pay tax credit was highly progressive, and the same goes for unemployment benefits, food stamps, the expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit, the spending on Medicaid and Pell grants, etc. I imagine most of the jobs created by the infrastructure projects also benefited workers in the bottom half of the income scale. The $70 billion spent on the AMT patch was, however, quite regressive. Overall, I'd say the stimulus pushed against inequality.
Health-care reform: I'll turn the mic over to David Leonhardt, who devoted a column to this topic. Short version: "The bill that President Obama signed on Tuesday is the federal government’s biggest attack on economic inequality since inequality began rising more than three decades ago." And unlike the stimulus, the health bill is, in theory, ongoing -- it's not a two-year interruption of long-term trends, but a change to the trends themselves.
Financial regulation: I could argue this one either way. It didn't do nearly enough, in my view, to cut pay or profits in the financial sector, both of which are major drivers of inequality. On the other hand, it did do a fair amount on both points (there are a raft of new regulations affecting compensation committees, for instance, though I don't know anyone who expects them to radically change compensation practices), it set up the new Consumer Protection Bureau to keep ordinary Americans from getting continually ripped off, and if it manages to stop some financial crises in the future, that'll be a huge help to the working class. Where you come down on this basically depends on whether you think they could've -- or should've -- gotten something significantly better through Congress.
The tax deal: Locked in the absurdly regressive Bush tax cuts, though it paired them with a new payroll tax cuts and the extension of unemployment benefits and various other tax extenders. Overall, a big win for inequality -- though also a big win on stimulus. But since this deal only lasts until 2012, the real question comes when Congress needs to craft a more permanent status quo for the tax code: If the tax cuts for the rich get extended, this becomes a huge accelerator of post-tax income inequality.
more...
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/12/we_have_not_yet_begun_to_fight.html 
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