THE WIDENING INCOME GAP (WHAT IF IT HAPPENED UNDER PRESIDENT BUSH?)

What if, six years into a President\’s terms of office, the gap between rich and poor continued to widen?  What would our media be saying about it.

Well, evidently, that depends on whether the President had an R or a D after his name.

Excerpted from an article at Agence France Presse:

Most Americans\’ incomes continued to fall last year, but the richest 20 percent saw theirs rise, a new Labor Department report showed Thursday.

In fresh data that adds fire to a growing debate over income inequality, the department said that Americans on average saw income decline for the second straight year in the 12 months to June 2014.

The average pre-tax income fell 0.9 percent from the same period a year earlier, to $64,432.

But broken down into quintiles, those in the top 20 percent of incomes saw their money stream grow by 0.9 percent to $166,048 on average.

Every other group lost ground, with the bottom 20 percent losing the most: their average income dropped 3.5 percent to $9,818.

Those losses came despite an economy that was picking up pace and generating well over 200,000 jobs a month last year.

Suppose this was President Bush (R) rather than President Obama (D)?  What would media be saying about it?

Would they be saying that his policies were not helping the middle class and poor, only the rich?

Would they be sneering at the job growth, and reminding viewers/readers/listeners that most of those jobs were part-time, which were putting people behind economically rather than moving them forward?  And that the only reason the unemployment rate is not stratospheric is that so many people have given up and dropped out of the job market (labor participation is at a 37 year low) so they don\’t count in the statistics anymore?

Well, don\’t hold your breath waiting for mainstream media to talk to you about any of this – not in more than a passing way, that is. 

Not when the current President has a D instead of an R after his name.  That changes everything.