Stuck in the Middle With Rich Lowry

National Review editor Rich Lowry has an interesting column on income inequality with a strange ending:

At the moment, American politics offers two separate, distinct ways not to address these issues: Either the brain-dead populism of the Left that blames it all on trade and the decline of unions, or the brain-dead populism of the Right that extols the working class without taking serious note of its agony. We'll have to do better: There's a crisis in the middle.

That's a pretty broad middle ground there that includes, among others, Barack Obama and really the vast majority of mainstream liberals. It's interesting that Lowry's article contains no mention, for example, of taxes—hardly an obscure political issue. Redistributive taxation seems to me to suggest itself as the most straightforward attack on inequality, and if you want to do the redistribution specifically as wage subsidies so as to not undercut bourgeois virtue I have no problem with that.