Another day, another batch of poll results from the New York Times pushing a liberal issue. Yesterday it was campaign finance. Thursday's front page brought the latest installment of the paper's ongoing obsession with "income inequality," "Inequality Troubles Americans Across Party Lines, a Poll Finds." The text box: "Americans say that wealth should be more evenly divided."
The poll questions themselves also come off stark and loaded. Here's the first one:
"Which comes closer to your view? In today's economy, everyone has a fair chance to get ahead in the long run, or in today's economy, it's mainly just a few people at the top who have a chance to get ahead?"
Faced with such dramatically diametric alternatives, it was perhaps predictable that the latter choice was the more popular one.
Reporters Noam Schieber and Dalia Sussman linked concerns about inequality to the 2016 race, with a hard focus on the GOP.
Americans are broadly concerned about inequality of wealth and income despite an economy that has improved by most measures, a sentiment that is already driving the 2016 presidential contest, according to a New York Times/CBS News poll.
The poll found that a strong majority say that wealth should be more evenly divided and that it is a problem that should be addressed urgently. Nearly six in 10 Americans said government should do more to reduce the gap between the rich and the poor, but they split sharply along partisan lines. Only one-third of Republicans supported a more active government role, versus eight in 10 of Democrats.
These findings help explain the populist appeals from politicians of both parties, but particularly Democrats, who are seeking to capitalize on the sense among Americans that the economic recovery is benefiting only a handful at the very top.
....
Still, it was Americans’ views on the distribution of money and opportunity in the country that were most striking. More than half of higher-income Americans said that money and wealth should be more evenly distributed. Across party lines, most Americans said the chance to get ahead was mainly a luxury for those at the top.
....
Almost three-quarters of respondents say that large corporations have too much influence in the country, about double the amount that said the same of unions. However, a majority of Americans said that workers who did not want to join a union at their workplace should be able to opt out of paying union fees, even as they benefit from the union’s protection and bargaining efforts. Unions generally oppose these right-to-work measures.
After so many soothing stats, the Times buried an unpleasant surprise for liberals in the last two paragraphs.
The poll also included a variety of intriguing findings about what Americans think should be done to reduce inequality.
Six in 10 Americans opposed requiring fast-food chains and other employers of hourly workers to raise wages to at least $15 an hour, the aim of a two-and-a-half year nationwide campaign led in part by a major union. (On Tuesday, Francis Slay, the mayor of St. Louis, threw his weight behind an effort to gradually raise the minimum wage there to $15 an hour by 2020, following similar moves in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle in recent years.)
Yet that didn't stop the paper from augmenting the story with an old photo of fast-food workers in Los Angeles protesting in favor of a $15 minimum wage.
The liberal scourge of "income inequality" has become a priority issue for the newspaper, and this is just the latest in a long chain of front-page news reports loaded with language worthy of the The Nation magazine like, "the rich are getting much richer."
Newsbusters has previously pointed out how such hand-wringing doesn't stop the Times from hawking $38,000 handbags and gold-plated lamb skulls.
