New: Obama's Great Conflation and What It Means for Income Mobility

A new study confirms what the old ones show: Income mobility - the ability to move between social class - has not changed over the past 40 or 50 years. So why, asks Nick Gillespie, does President Barack Obama insist that growing income inequality means declining rates of mobility?:

From a political perspective, the erroneous but strategic conflation of inequality and mobility makes obvious sense. After all, if mobility is as alive and well as it has been in the post-war era, then the sense of urgency the president needs to sell any legislation is largely undercut. As important, constant mobility rates also make a mockery of the president's long-preferred strategy of redistributing income from the top of the income ladder down to the lower rungs. Whether he's talking to Joe the Plumber (god, that seems like a different planet, doesn't it?) or addressing Congress, Obama rarely misses an opportunity to ask richer Americans to "do a little bit more."