The president laid the groundwork for middle-class economics during his State of the Union address on Tuesday.
WASHINGTON — President Obama’s push for a new “middle-class economics” may go nowhere in Congress, but his ambitious array of proposals to raise stagnant incomes and provide more government support for struggling working families will frame his last two years in office and help make the politics of rich and poor a central issue in the campaign to succeed him.
With the economy finally on more solid ground, even leading Republicans, on Capitol Hill and on the nascent 2016 presidential campaign front, are tempering complaints about overall economic growth and refocusing on the more intractable problem of income inequality.
Mitt Romney, vowing a campaign to “end the scourge of poverty” if he runs for president a third time, has backed raising the minimum wage over the wishes of congressional leaders.
Similarly, Jeb Bush’s new “super PAC,” announced with the fanfare of a presidential declaration, proclaimed, “While the last eight years have been pretty good ones for top earners, they’ve been a lost decade for the rest of America.”
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Mr. Chen, the former Romney adviser, said conservative economists had focused on wage subsidies through the tax code and more aggressive worker retraining programs through public-private partnerships and apprenticeships. To counter free community college, such economists have suggested offering incentives to universities to make sure students complete their degrees.
But such “reform conservatism” has a long way to go before being accepted by the dominant players in Republican circles.
Mr. Obama is not just pursuing “the wrong policies,” Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio said Wednesday. “They’re the wrong priorities, and growing Washington’s bureaucracy here instead of helping to grow the economy and helping to grow opportunities for middle-class families.”
“There’s a better way,” he said. “We need to fix our broken tax code, balance our budget, replace the broken health care law with solutions that lower cost and protect jobs.”
A version of this news analysis appears in print on January 22, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Talk of Wealth Gap Prods the G.O.P. to Refocus. Order Reprints| Today’s Paper|Subscribe
