Should income inequality in the United States be a matter of great public concern?
Is it something that government should stick its nose into?
Questions like that seem particularly timely this week, which marks 50 years since Lyndon Johnson announced his Great Society vision. Great Society programs – the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, Medicaid, and much more – accomplished a lot, but they didn’t work miracles. And despite Johnson’s hope for a brighter economic future for all Americans, income inequality in the US is severe – among the worst of any developed nation.
French economist Thomas Piketty has been getting lots of attention for his best-seller, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century.” In it, Piketty focuses on the current concentration of wealth in the hands of a relatively few people and warns that if we don’t do something about it, the rich will keep getting richer, and inequality will keep going up.
The inequality we face now isn’t only between the poor and the rest of the US. It’s between the super-rich and everybody else: middle-income, low-income, and poor. Middle-income wages have stagnated.
In the Times last week, writer Eduardo Porter compared the current inequality to that of the early 20th century, when the rich – the “robber barons” – were getting richer and the poor were getting poorer.
Back then, Porter noted, riots, strikes, and muckraking reports led to progressive legislation – government action, including the progressive income tax – that dramatically changed things.
But we’re back in the robber-baron days. “The income of a typical American family has barely risen since the 1970’s,” Porter wrote. “The share of national income captured by the richest 1 percent of Americans is even higher than it was at the dawn of the 20th century.”
For many of us, inequality is a moral concern: Where’s the justice in a corporate CEO earning millions of dollars more than a teacher (and a hedge-fund manager billions of dollars a year)? Where’s the justice in students in a wealthy suburb having access to a better education than those in a poor urban neighborhood?
Arguments about injustice and fairness don’t seem to have much appeal these days, but you don’t have to be concerned about justice to care about the rising inequality. The concern over inequality isn’t just an “it’s not fair” whine. And conservatives enamored with US “exceptionalism” ought to be as concerned as liberals are.
It doesn’t take an economist to see where inequality is leading us. A nation in which the handful of super-rich continue to get richer and the majority of citizens struggle means a nation with a declining public education system that turns out poorly educated students; a nation with fewer advances in science, medicine, technology, and industry; deteriorating infrastructure….
And that kind of nation most certainly can’t be a world leader – in anything.
Porter raises a challenging question: “Can democracy stop inequality from rising?”
His own assessment isn’t encouraging. Voter turnout by the poor isn’t as strong as for the rich; many of us, regardless of income, don’t trust government; and in this day of freewheeling political fundraising, the rich can buy what they want, not only yachts and mansions but also political influence and legislation.
Inequality of the type we’re experiencing now, Thomas Piketty said in an interview with Porter in March, “directly threatens our democratic institutions and values.”
A question, then: What kind of country do we want to leave to our children? How do we envision ourselves as a more perfect union – a Great Society, or whatever we want to call it? What do we really want the nation to be like? And if government policies and government action of some sort aren’t the way to reduce inequality, what is?
Or, as we become more alienated from one another and less interested in the Common Good, have we reached the point where we don’t even care?
This article appears in May 21-27, 2014.
The government has helped the 1% get where they are! The question is how people will react to the facts. Will they demand political action from our leaders!
Well, under Obama rule the rich have gotten richer and the number of poor has swelled. Middle class shrank.
So….your solution is more of these same policies?
By and large, the super-rich—from Buffett, to Wall Street, to the New York Times’s billionaire owners, to Hollywood and Silicon Valley—are liberal Democrats who support the same causes and candidates the editorial writer does. Sometimes it’s prudent to be careful what we wish for.
Contrary to the editorial, unfortunately, you do need some grasp of economics to make sense of Piketty’s theory and its flaws. Common sense will suffice, however, to recognize that the Obama regime’s zeal in pandering to rich white environmentalist ideologues and other so-called “progressive” interests—let alone the health care debacle—has produced nothing but stagnation, joblessness, dependency, and misery.
Where’s the justice in a former corporate lawyer and political spouse pulling down a cool five million dollars in the past year for “speaking” (something the rest of us do every day for nothing)? Yet this newspaper will ostentatiously champion her cause in 2016 and pronounce it a victory for wymynkind.
the word “society” in todays world. well, when the ‘well off’ refer to the poor in a negative way they say “society” doesnt approve. For example, “society” is the ‘well off ‘and everyone else, the poor are not part of this “society” in fact it seems to mean that “society” are the total of the country and everyone else, the poor are not rteally citizens at all. Its what “society” thinks about the poor. They hate them and blame them for things. Blame the victims punish the victims. The poor are not seen as part of “society” Im not taking about the very rich, just the ‘well off’. People who dont understand or know what its like to be poor. Maybe they are not meant to understand. But it set them apart. Segregates them. I think these people within the so called “society” are more socialiy isolated than the poor. The poor have to look after and care for the poor. No one else will. The poor should stop looking to the govenment or the rich to help them. They wont. As a poor person I have a “responsibility” to look out for other poor people. Coz I understand.
Perhaps Mitt Romney would have been the better choice. Prejudice against the super-rich CAN backfire. I just wish he paid higher taxes. He probably would’ve gotten more votes.
Current levels of inequality are a direct result of Fed policies and trade deals, neither of which enjoy the support of the general public by a large margin – Left, Right, or Center. In short, they are a direct result of corrupt Government for sale to the highest bidder, both sides of the aisle. Only social issues separate the two major parties, and that has nothing to do with financial, trade or tax policy.
Most of the current stock market gains are a result of leveraged buy-backs on a grand scale, intended more to bolster executive compensation than any other reason.
Consider this, high levels of inequality are only a problem if you’re at the bottom end of things. The economy is not broken, its working exactly as intended by those in a position to directly influence it.
It has emerged that a lamestream media organization pays Chelsea Clinton $600,000 per annum for her occasional TV performances in the role of “special correspondent”. (For example: A hard-hitting interview with a certain computer-animated gecko.) She appears on average about 28 seconds per week, so her modest stipend works out to about $1.5 million per hour of air time (more than 200,000 times the federal minimum wage). Where’s the justice in that? Where are the editorials? Keep this in mind the next time Chelsea or her sleazy parents natter on about “inequality”—or whine about being “dead broke” themselves.