David Brooks: Obama Gave "Excellent Speech" On Income Inequality
JUDY WOODRUFF: We were talking about -- seriously, David, we were talking about income inequality. Mark was -- I asked both of you about the president saying this week he's -- he wants to devote the rest of his time in office to trying to do something about income inequality in this country.
DAVID BROOKS: Well, it's one of the big major issues, so that's a good idea.
And I agree with Mark. I thought it was an excellent speech. It was a little lacking in agenda items, realistically, because there's not that much that is going to be passed. But there was an interesting elision in it, which elided really two sides of a debate. And he used it -- and they must have been very conscious of this because of the way they structured the speech.
They used the phrase income inequality and social mobility constantly together. And, of course, they are related problems, but sometimes they point in different policy response directions. And so, if your main problem is income inequality, then you're going to want to focus on -- maybe on the top 1 percent or the top 5 percent, and you're going want to have tax policies, health care policies that are about redistribution.
If you are focusing on social mobility, you are probably going to see it as a human capital problem, and you're going to focus on early childhood education, which the president does, college loans, maybe some family structure issues.
And so you don't have to choose totally A. and B., but you probably have to pick a priority. And so it would be -- there is a very interesting debate about which path is the more appropriate path to take. I personally take the social mobility path, lifting more up from the bottom, not worrying as much about redistribution. But the president sort of fuzzed over those choices.
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