Inequality — that’s the foremost issue for so-called progressives these days, and here is what it means in their compassionate souls: not inequality under the law, which would be abhorrent in a just society, but inequality of income. Somehow they seem to think that some people having more money than others is what makes people poor, but it isn’t, and getting wallets and purses skinnier requires coercion and less liberty.
Our economy is not like a pie that has only so many pieces. It is dynamic, it has been growing; the pieces of the pie multiply because of people like a guy named Joe who comes up with a life-expanding innovation and is now a multi-millionaire. That does not mean that poor old Tom has lost money. No, Joe, you see, has built a factory and unemployed Tom lands a job and he is doing fine. But the progressives are still hunting for Joe.
They want to take his money through sky-high taxes and distribute it to others and thereby reduce incentives and profits, making him produce less, hit consumers with higher prices and lay off employees. The thing is, they already do that. Profits, which are comparable to electricity that turns on the lights and food that keeps you alive, are evil, they assure you as they manage to leave out crucial facts in their calculations.
One of the constant progressive falsehoods has to do with how wide the income gap has become between the poor and the rich. They would have you know that the top 20% in average household income make close to 60 times as much as the average in the bottom 20 percent, something like $295,904 to $4,908. Phil Gramm, a former senator, and John F. Early, a former official at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, set the record straight in the Wall Street Journal.
They note that the average low-income household receives benefits worth $45,389 from state and federal transfer programs along with help coming from other sources, and that those in the top 20% pay average taxes of $109,125. Put it all together and you have $50,901 in income for the not-so poor and $194,906 for the less rich, an actual gap of 3.8 times more. The bad side is that people are incentivized to drop out of the workforce, weakening the economy for all.
All of this and more is important to know right now because progressives see the coronavirus pandemic and the American shutdown as events that will open doors to their income equality ambitions, as in rebuilding a free market into one that regulates businesses to the extent of new minimum wages likely to cost more than a million people their jobs. They do not note that one of President Donald Trump’s triumphs was to do some deregulating, helping to give black Americans — particularly hurt by the virus pandemic — their highest employment record ever.
If you really want to do something long-term about poverty, you need to look at the growth of single-parent homes, the primary factor in decreased social mobility, dropping out of school and intergenerational poverty.
Underperforming public schools do not help. Culture matters, as in the difference between a child allowed to watch TV all day and one who reads a book occasionally. We can either be beneficiaries or victims of the communities we grow up in, such as the blessings that flow from those valuing family, religion and communal engagement and those that don’t, some analysts remind us.
Issues of this kind do not demand the foul play of dismantling an economy seeking to be robust again, but to neighbors helping neighbors, of institutions doing what they are supposed to do, of values that say we as individuals have responsibilities beyond ourselves. It is true that COVID-19 has been devastating to the poor and that things could get worse, but just maybe more of us will reach out the way so many have in dealing with this pandemic.
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ABOUT THE WRITER
Jay Ambrose is an op-ed columnist for Tribune News Service. Readers may email him at speaktojay@aol.com.
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