The Myth of American Inequality: How Government Biases Policy Debate
- Our gradual national policy shift toward enforcing equality of result has taken on an aspect of inexorability disturbing even to the stubbornest Reaganite optimist.
- How, and when, did this shift happen?
- One answer, as per Vonnegut, starts with measurement
- Back in those same early 1960s, a Social Security Administration economist named Mollie Orshansky, concerned about the "dollar gap" between rich and poor, set out to create a statistic to quantify poverty nationwide
- Armed with this new data point, swiftly elevated to an official product of the Census Bureau, President Lyndon Johnson declared "unconditional war on poverty"
- Not satisfied with containment, Johnson opted for a strategy of massive retaliation, securing commitment from Congress to more than 100 different programs, together known as the Great Society
- Most of these-Medicare, for example-ran from the top down
- Federal funding for education flowed to public universities and public schools
- Some represented a kind of faux federalism, whereby Washington bribed states and counties into surrendering authority over areas (roads, housing) they had historically controlled
What's missing
- A thorough review of the costs that the progressive tax structure has exacted from our economy
- Analysis of the effects that redistributors' higher taxes would have on productivity
- Too many people seem unaware of the potential damage of wealth-tax proposals mooted by Senator Elizabeth Warren or Professor Piketty
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