{"id":661,"date":"2014-01-12T20:29:00","date_gmt":"2014-01-12T20:29:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2014\/01\/so-what-about-income-inequality-anyway.html"},"modified":"2014-01-12T20:29:00","modified_gmt":"2014-01-12T20:29:00","slug":"so-what-about-income-inequality-anyway","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2014\/01\/so-what-about-income-inequality-anyway.html","title":{"rendered":"So what about income inequality, anyway?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

So I was writing yesterday<\/a> about the War on Poverty, and at the same time posted comments along a similar vein at the Cass Sunstein blog, in a post called \u201cNew War on Poverty Needs Correct Facts<\/a>\u201d \u2014 to which a reader responded, \u201cPoverty is a relative measure. We\u2019re all of us wealthier than one hundred years or even fifty years ago. The key issue is whether it is acceptable and consistent with our founding principles that so much of our national wealth should be controlled by a tiny minority?\u201d<\/p>\n

I suspect that my readers generally don\u2019t need to be persuaded on the following points, but I thought it\u2019d be a useful exercise to write a response.<\/p>\n

Some time ago, my boys read a book called The Book of Ember<\/em>.\u00a0 The premise of the book was that, with an environmental collapse eminent, a city was established underground, lit by artificial lights, with enough food (in combination with greenhouses) and other goods stored to last its people for 200 years, but through a plot twist, many years after the planned 200, its inhabitants didn\u2019t know that the time to leave had arrived, or even that there was a way to leave, and food, clothing, paper \u2014 everything is in short supply as the story opens.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

Now, in that world, there truly was a fixed \u201cpie\u201d and anything disproportionate that one family, or one generation, took meant less for everyone else, potentially a woefully insufficient amount.\u00a0 But that\u2019s not our world.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

At the same time, imagine a variation of the Welfare State in which one is so cared for, in every contingency, that asset-building is not necessary.\u00a0 College is free \u2014 no need to save for it.\u00a0 Unemployment benefits are extensive and indefinite.\u00a0 Medical costs are fully paid for by the government.\u00a0 Social Security (and employer-provided pension) benefits\u00a0are generous enough that, when different tax treatment\u00a0is taken into account, there\u2019s no drop in living standards upon retirement.\u00a0 Oh, and let\u2019s also stipulate that mass transit is so well-developed that cars are unneeded, and, due to the lack of favored tax treatment for housing, it\u2019s nothing more than a personal choice whether to rent or buy.\u00a0 <\/p>\n

In such a scenario, wealth inequalities just wouldn\u2019t matter.\u00a0 For the average middle-class family, it would purely be a personal decision whether to save for the future \u2014 and the \u201csaving\u201d might be more short-term, saving for a big vacation.<\/p>\n

In our world, in principle, we could play Robin Hood and take wealth away from the wealthy \u2014 but we don\u2019t have a practice of taxing wealth, just income and property.\u00a0 And heavier income taxes on the wealthy won\u2019t actually, in and of themselves, do anything about income inequality unless we adjust our metrics to determine after-tax levels of equality.<\/p>\n

And is income inequality the \u201ckey issue\u201d as the commenter quoted above claims?\u00a0 No, at best its tertiary.\u00a0 First comes the question of whether the living conditions of the poor are severely substandard.\u00a0 Second is whether lower-income people are able to support themselves independently, rather than being dependent on the government.\u00a0 (And I mean that both in the sense of mindset and ability, given a certain set of economic conditions.)\u00a0 Then \u2014 maybe<\/em> \u2014 we can look at inequality, but not as a situation requiring direct\u00a0intervention, but as a symptom of a larger issue.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, the narrower issue of inflated CEO pay does irritate me.\u00a0 I don\u2019t have any trouble with someone founding a company and earning big bucks because the company does well.\u00a0 But when a CEO, who\u00a0is after all an employee, not an owner, of the company, is paid tens of millions of dollars or more, it\u00a0comes out of the pockets\u00a0of the shareholders,\u00a0since those millions are money which\u00a0is\u00a0not paid out as dividends or invested back into the company.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So I was writing yesterday about the War on Poverty, and at the same time posted comments along a similar vein at the Cass Sunstein blog, in a post called \u201cNew War on Poverty Needs Correct Facts\u201d \u2014 to which a reader responded, \u201cPoverty is a relative measure. We\u2019re all of us wealthier than one […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-661","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nSo what about income inequality, anyway?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"So I was writing yesterday about the War on Poverty, and at the same time posted comments along a similar vein at the Cass Sunstein blog, in a post called\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2014\/01\/so-what-about-income-inequality-anyway.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta 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