Obama Plans Assault on Income Inequality

The Wall Street Journal's Gerald Seib has a column previewing President Obama's second term based on "conversations with those in the Obama world." Mr. Seib writes that in addition to work on energy and immigration, the president plans "a new assault on income inequality." The vehicle would be "a broad overhaul of the American tax code to make it more efficient and more progressive at the same time, through a combination of flatter tax rates for all and fewer exemptions and loopholes at the top." I don't quite follow how a tax code can be both "more progressive" and "flatter" at the same time (I suppose the flattening would be less than the loophole-reducing), but the key point to remember is that Obama and his allies aren't satisfied with an assault on poverty, and they aren't satisfied with a tax code that merely raises the required revenues for the necessary work of government. They instead see the tax code as a way to rectify income inequality by redistributing income from the upper income earners to the lower income earners. A lot of the administration's tax moves that are not comprehensible in terms of deficit-reduction or growth-promotion or simplification all of a sudden start to make sense in a framework in which reducing income inequality is an end goal.