President Obama worries about income inequality, but not enough to encourage his closest political advisers to part with some of their riches. Rich Lowry makes that point in a new National Review Online column.
Stephanie Cutter, an adviser to the Obama reelection campaign, wrote a scathing memo the other day about Mitt Romney’s experience at Bain Capital, subtitled “Profit at Any Cost.”
Cutter sounded like a sworn enemy of private equity. Except a few years ago, she was a spokeswoman for J.C. Flowers, a private-equity firm. Why do work for J.C. Flowers when there are so many other worthy ventures needing communications help that don’t make insane amounts of money and pay incredibly well?
Presumably Cutter wanted to be as well compensated as possible, by J.C. Flowers and the “several Fortune 500 companies” her communications firm served, according to her bio. This is utterly unremarkable but for the fact that she is part of an Obama team that argues there is something inherently wrong with income inequality. In his signature Osawatomie, Kan., speech, President Barack Obama asserted that rising inequality hampers those at the bottom. If that’s so, shouldn’t the people around him endeavor to keep from adding to the injustice by making too much money?
But none of them goes out and gets poor. Very few of them, it seems, even go out and get middle-class. They get rich. Many of them climb right into the 1 percent.
