No, the worst economic idea of the year wasn’t Obamacare. The worst economic idea of the year:is that America’s “defining challenge” -both morally and economically- is income inequality.

2014's real economic challenge

by James Pethokoukis

Creating good jobs and training Americans to get them 

— not snatching income from the 1 percent

No, the worst economic idea of the year wasn’t Obamacare. 

- First of all, that was the worst idea of 2010 (though it’s still around, so perhaps the Worst Economic Idea of the Year Award should just be renamed the Obamacare Award and given to the second-worst idea of each year). 

- Second, the Affordable Care Act is just one policy manifestation of what really is the worst economic idea of the year: that America’s “defining challenge” — both morally and economically — is income inequality. 

So President Obama has declared, and it’s an opinion that seems almost universally shared by the American Left, including New York City’s incoming mayor.

It’s interesting to note all the economic problems that Obama apparently views as less important challenges than income inequality. 

- Take, for instance, chronically weak economic growth.

 On average, the U.S. economy has grown by just 1 percent a year, adjusted for inflation, since 2000. Over those 14 years, the American economy has notched just six quarters of real GDP growth of 4 percent or higher, versus 18 quarters of such rapid growth in each of the two preceding decades (the 1980s and 1990s). And the president’s own economic team has declared, “in the 21st century, real GDP growth in the United States is likely to be permanently slower” than in the past.

- Or how about the long emergency that is the U.S. labor market? 

If the share of adults with any sort of employment were back to pre–Great Recession levels, there would be 12 million more Americans with jobs. Just as bad, that employment rate hasn’t budged much from recession lows. And the jobs that have been created aren’t as good as the ones lost during the downturn, continuing a 20-year trend of recessions’ generating weak job recoveries. More than half of the jobs that vanished during the downturn were middle-income positions, and less than a quarter of the new ones are. Analysis by Goldman Sachs found that the “hollowing out in the middle is real” and “not unique to the post-crisis period.”

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