Josh Barro, Columnist

Why `You Didn’t Build That' Resonates

July 30, 2012 at 4:42 PM EDT

Josh Barro is the lead writer for the Ticker, Bloomberg View's blog on economics, finance and politics. His primary areas of interest include tax and fiscal policy, state and local government, and planning and land use. Previously, Barro was a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and a commercial real estate banker at Wells Fargo. He holds a bachelor's degree in psychology from Harvard and lives in Queens, New York.

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Jonathan Chait says the president’s "you didn't build that" speech revived racial resentments about redistributive fiscal policy, partly because the president was speaking in a “black dialect.”

Maybe this was a problem with the speech, but the key problem was much simpler: The president was needlessly insulting. He wasn’t just calling on successful people to pay more in tax but was being dismissive of their accomplishments.

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