You'd never know from this year's presidential campaign rhetoric that anyone in Washington has been paying any attention to economic inequality. Donald Trump has hijacked the Republican Party with his populist rhetoric about working class Americans no longer "winning", and Hillary Clinton acknowledges at every turn that inequality needs addressing. No one seems to recognise the great strides made during the past eight years of Barack Obama's presidency to mitigate the problem.
That's a shame, because the Obama-era efforts hold important lessons about what's possible in addressing inequality and how we must do better in the future.
As Mr Obama entered office, public consciousness of inequality of income and wealth was on the rise and the Great Recession brought disastrous economic consequences for tens of millions of Americans. In the past 40 years, inequality of income rose faster in the US than in any other nation and the inequality of wealth exceeded that found in any other advanced economy.
Mr Obama tackled the problem of inequality from the beginning. The first bill he signed as president was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act -- an equal pay legislation. Ms Ledbetter had worked for Goodyear for 20 years before learning she was paid less than men for the same job. The law removed the requirement that a petition regarding discriminatory pay be filed within 180 days of the discrimination; it also made any discriminatory paycheck actionable.
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the administration's 2009 stimulus bill, has not received enough credit for assisting poor families and for preventing more people from falling into poverty. The act added US$20 billion (about 700 billion baht) for food stamps and food banks, support for poor neighbourhoods, an increase in unemployment insurance, and $3.5 billion for job training. With an unprecedented 45 million Americans in poverty today, one enduring criticism is that Mr Obama should have focused on a second stimulus rather than his healthcare bill.
Yet the Affordable Care and Patient Protection Act also helped reduce inequality to a degree. The law's redistributive features are not generally recognised by the public, but they help explain the unrelenting opposition from its reactionary opponents. Obamacare contains higher Medicare payroll taxes on individuals with incomes above $200,000 and families with incomes above $250,000 and it levies fees on the healthcare industry (which has gained millions of new customers from the act) and on drug and medical device manufacturers.
Mr Obama's critics, and the president himself, have said he hasn't done enough to tell the story of this battle against inequality. But it's not for lack of trying. In December 2011, Mr Obama confronted the unfairness of our economic system in a speech at Osawatomie, Kansas, where ex-president Theodore Roosevelt in 1910 made his historic "New Nationalism" speech calling for a "Square Deal" for the American people.
The next month, Mr Obama's State of the Union focused on restoring the US promise of opportunity. Always cautious during his first term, Mr Obama waited until after his re-election to talk directly about "income inequality". Instead, he emphasised fairness and everyone "playing by the same rules". At the time, billionaire Warren Buffett pointedly disclosed that he was taxed at a lower rate than his secretary (who Mr Obama invited to sit with First Lady Michelle Obama in the House gallery for the State of the Union), and Mr Obama called attention to the unfairness of hedge fund earnings being taxed at 15%; anyone earning over $1 million, he said, should pay an effective tax rate of at least 30%. The Republican-controlled House predictably ignored his suggestion.
In his campaign for re-election, Mr Obama hammered away at the same themes, while successfully painting his opponent Mitt Romney as an out-of-touch rich guy. Once re-elected, in his 2013 State of the Union, Mr Obama spoke directly about income inequality, calling it "the defining challenge of our time". He promised to devote the rest of his presidency to attacking inequality. The Congress he addressed had reached a milestone: more than half its members were millionaires and the body's total worth neared $5 billion.
Mr Obama's second term is often portrayed as an exercise in futility: the president proposes and the Republican Congress opposes. But in 2013, the president's give-and-take with Republicans on budget priorities succeeded in increasing tax rates on the highest earners.
This happened in two ways: Money in tax shelters got treated like other income and limits were imposed on the deductions high earners can claim. While the "Bush tax cuts" were extended for most Americans, the cuts for those making over $500,000 expired. The so-called 1% are now taxed at pre-Ronald Reagan levels. Although most capital gains are still taxed at only 15%, more affluent taxpayers in the 39.6& income-tax bracket now face a 20% rate on their capital gains. The result: The 400 highest earners among US taxpayers are now paying an effective tax rate of 22.9%, up from 16.7% in 2012, but still down from 26.4% in the late 1990s.
Mr Obama made effective use of executive powers to address inequality. Unable to persuade Republicans to raise the federal minimum wage, (stuck at $7.25 an hour), Mr Obama has used the "bully pulpit" to advocate higher wages and encouraged a growing movement among states and cities to raise their minimums on their own.
In 2014, the president issued an executive order raising the minimum for workers hired by federal contractors to $10.10 an hour. The president also required federal contractors to report wage data to the Labour Department, to prevent abuses and serve as fuel for future action.
In early 2015 Mr Obama again resorted to an executive order to give federal workers up to six weeks of paid maternity leave, and asked Congress to extend this to private workers. The president also advocated a Healthy Families Act giving workers in the private sector up to seven days paid sick leave. Just four states and the District of Columbia, along with 18 cities, have passed laws requiring employers to give such paid leave.
The Labour Department also issued guidelines to help states establish savings plans for private-sector employees whose employers don't offer them. And Mr Obama has sought to reverse regulations that burden unions. While organised labour was disappointed that the president and Senate Democrats failed to enact legislation making it easier to unionise workplaces, Mr Obama delivered a huge gain for low-wage service workers in his appointments to the National Labour Relations Board.
In August 2015, the board delivered a series of decisions by a 3-2 partisan vote making it easier for unions to represent workers in fast-food restaurants and retail giants like Wal-Mart.
In May, the Department of Labour announced sweeping new overtime rules that could affect as many as 12.5 million workers. This will make it almost impossible for employers, even smaller firms, to avoid paying overtime to workers who put in more than an eight-hour workday.
Higher income tax rates on the affluent, subsidies for health insurance, expanded tax breaks for poor families with children, and other measures, amount to an impressive government counterattack on advancing inequality. Still, the administration faces two problems in selling its narrative: the fact that public opinion is a lagging indicator to economic reality, and the more daunting reality that there are limits to what government can do in the face of structural forces creating deeper income and wealth inequality in our society.
As Mr Obama prepares to leave office, Americans are only now beginning to consider his overall legacy, and may soon come to appreciate his efforts to combat economic inequality and restore a sense of fairness and opportunity. Whether his successor will try to build on those efforts, or be able to do so, remains to be seen.
Ron Formisano is the author of 'Plutocracy in America: How Increasing Inequality Destroys the Middle Class and Exploits the Poor' and professor emeritus of history at the University of Kentucky.