Opinion: Look Who%u2019s Winning Under Obamanomics

(Oct. 25) -- Throughout his presidential campaign and into his first two years in the White House, President Barack Obama portrayed himself as a champion of the middle class, ready to wage battle with big business and Wall Street fat cats to make sure the wealth got "spread around."

Back in March 2008, at a speech given on Wall Street, for example, he said that in the past, "we let the special interests put their thumbs on the economic scales. The result," he said, is "a market that favors Wall Street over Main Street."

In September of that year, he argued that "for too long, [the Bush] administration has been wiling to hit the fast-forward button" to help Wall Street firms, "while pressing pause when it comes to saving jobs or keeping people in their homes."

The next month, Obama said the country can't afford "four more years of the economic theory that says we should give more and more to millionaires and billionaires and hope that prosperity trickles down to everyone else. It's time to turn the page."

Sources: Bureau of Labor Statistics, Bureau of Economic Analysis, Realtor.com, Dow Jones industrial average

This chart shows the changes in employment, earnings, home prices, disposable income, the Dow and corporate profits since President Obama took office.

And he said had a plan to do just that. "I've put forward a series of proposals," he said during the campaign, "that will foster economic growth from the bottom up."

But whatever his intentions, Obama's policies so far haven't exactly produced the results he promised.

In fact, the opposite has occurred.

As the nearby chart shows, by almost every measure, the middle class hasn't benefited much at all over the past two years – the number of employed has fallen while wages, disposable income and home prices have pretty much flatlined.

At the same time, Wall Street and big business have made out like bandits. The Dow is up 30 percent since Obama took office, and corporate profits have shot up 42 percent.

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Meantime, companies are sitting on so much cash -- nearly $2 trillion worth -- they don't know what to do with it all. The non-financial companies in the S&P 500 index have seen their cash stockpile climb 26 percent over the previous year. Apple alone has amassed almost $26 billion in cash.

Obama may be right, as he said in August, that "on issue after issue, the Republicans in Congress have sided with corporate special interests over middle-class families."

But when it comes to actual results, Obama might want to take a good long look in the mirror.