Note: This article originally appeared at The Daily
Beast on Tuesday, January 28.
Read it there.

If there’s one dead-of-winter public spectacle even more
soul-sapping and self-congratulatory than the Grammys —now taking its cues,
however well-intentioned, from the late Rev. Sun Myung Moon
by staging
mass weddings —it’s the annual State of the Union address
(due to be delivered tonight at
9 p.m. ET).

Like high school graduation speeches, State of the Union
addresses are
typically forgotten in real time, even as they are being
delivered. Perhaps realizing his time in office is dwindling down
with little to show for it, Obama will take a page from Lady Gaga
at the 2011 Grammys and emerge from a
translucent egg.

Alas, that’s as unlikely as his declaring
an end to the federal war on pot. By all accounts, Obama will
instead talk
a lot about economic inequality, the increasing spread in
income and wealth between the richest and poorest Americans that he
calls the “defining
challenge of our time” and that has only gotten worse on
hiswatch.

If past pronouncements are any indication, the president will
immediately—and erroneously—conflate growing income
inequality with
reduced economic mobility. As he said in a speech last
December, “The problem is that alongside increased inequality,
we’ve seen diminished levels of upward mobility in recent
years.”

This is flatly wrong. Research published last week by economists
at Harvard (Raj Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren) and Berkeley (Patrick
Kline, Emmanuel Saez) concludes that
rates of mobility among income quintiles have not in fact changed
in decades. As the Washington Post summarized
it, “Children growing up in America today are just as likely—no
more, no less—to climb the economic ladder as children born more
than a half-century ago, a team of economists reported
Thursday.”

While noting large variations in mobility based on geographic
location and other factors (the biggest being “the fraction of
single parents in the area”), Chetty, et al. conclude “a child born
in the bottom fifth of the income distribution has a 7.8% chance of
reaching the top fifth in the U.S. as a whole.”

That chance at going from bottom to top may strike you as
unacceptably low—it does me, for sure—but the larger point is that
it hasn’t changed over time. Elsewhere, the researchers show
similarly constant
rates of mobility for people born into middle and
higher-income quintiles. Growing inequality doesn’t mean that
mobility has declined, much less stopped altogether, and policies
designed to level or redistribute income won’t increase mobility
(if they even succeed at actually squeezing income
disparities).

It’s important to stress that the new study by Chetty et al.
simply confirms what other researchers have been finding
for years. For instance, Scott
Winship, who has worked at Pew and Brookings and now is a
scholar at the Manhattan Institute, compared mobility for Americans
born in the early 1960s and early 1980s. He
found “that upward mobility from poverty to the middle
class rose from 51 percent to 57 percent between the early-’60s
cohorts and the early-’80s ones. Rather than assert that mobility
has increased, I want to simply say—at this stage of my research
(which is ongoing)—that it has not declined.”

As Winship told me in a 2012
interview, “You can be concerned that there’s
not enough [economic] mobility or enough opportunity, but
you don’t have to also believe that things are getting worse.”
Winship also underscored what is clear from the past 50 years or
more: It’s actually incredibly hard to figure out exactly how to
increase mobility rates.

Tonight, don’t expect President Obama to cite any research
showing that mobility has remained constant. Instead, expect him to
echo his December speech, which was filled with lines about “a
dangerous and growing inequality and lack of upward mobility that
has jeopardized middle-class America’s basic bargain—that if you
work hard, you have a chance to get ahead.”

From a political perspective, the erroneous but strategic
conflation of inequality and mobility makes obvious sense. After
all, if mobility is as alive and well as it has been in the
post-war era, then the sense of urgency the president needs to sell
any legislation is largely undercut. As important, constant
mobility rates also make a mockery of the president’s
long-preferred strategy of redistributing income from the top of
the income ladder down to the lower rungs. Whether he’s talking to
Joe the Plumber (god, that seems like a different planet, doesn’t
it?) or addressing Congress, Obama rarely misses an opportunity to
ask richer Americans to “do a little bit more.”

But as it stands, the United States already has one
of the
very most progressive tax systems in the world. Even the
liberals at Wonkblog grant
that much. The real problem, they and others note, is that rather
than give direct cash payments to the less well-off, the U.S.
prefers to dole out favors via tax breaks that are far more
likely to
benefit the wealthy and not the middle or lower classes
(think mortgage-interest deductions on not just one but two
homes).

Don’t expect Obama to talk seriously about reining in tax breaks
or reforming entitlements that benefit the wealthy even as he says
they must pay “a bit more.” In fact, don’t expect anything new from
tonight’s speech. This is a president who is long on revealed truth
and exceptionally short of wisdom borne out of his experience in
office.

Instead, get ready for a long list of calls to maintain and
increase many programs that have been in place since before Obama
took office: extending unemployment benefits (without paying
for them by, say, cutting defense spending), making it easier for
people to buy or stay in homes whose prices are inflated by
government policies, and increasing access to higher education in
ways that continue to increase prices far higher than the rate of
inflation. Pump more money into a broken K-12 education system
whose per-pupils costs rise as results stay flat (certainly the
president won’t call for giving parents and children the right to
choose their own schools).