The Patriot Post® · Study: Income Mobility Is Stable

“Income inequality” is going to be Barack Obama’s tired refrain in 2014, as he and his fellow Democrats ramp up their midterm election campaign. It will no doubt be the focus of Tuesday’s State of the Union address. However, a recent study from Harvard shows that income mobility has remained stable – perhaps even improved slightly – over the last 50 years. The study’s authors found that “the probability that a child reaches the top fifth of the income distribution given parents in the bottom fifth of the income distribution is 8.4% for children born in 1971, compared with 9.0% for those born in 1986.” But that won’t stop the Left’s narrative or change the fact that leftist policies produce the very “income inequality” they decry.

Still, writes the Heritage Foundation’s Donald Schneider, “just because the rates of mobility haven’t declined doesn’t mean we should be happy with them – nor is it an indicator that all is well. In terms of our ability to lift people out of poverty and into the middle class and beyond, our rates of upward mobility are still insufficient. The sad truth is that 70% of poor Americans fail to reach the middle class.”

People can do three main things to help their opportunity for advancement: graduate from high school, marry before having children and hold down a job. Unfortunately, marrying before having children is going by the wayside because of cultural degradation over the same 50-year period that the Harvard study covers, and getting a job has become increasingly difficult in the Obama “recovery.” Transferring income from the haves to the have-nots is not the solution to the lack of mobility as Democrats would have us believe. But we fully expect to hear plenty of that in Tuesday’s State of the Union Address.