Equal is unfair : America's misguided fight against income inequality

294 Pages·2016·5.09 MB·English

by  Watkins

EQUAL IS UNFAIR
AMERICA’S MISGUIDED FIGHT AGAINST
INCOME INEQUALITY
DON WATKINS YARON BROOK
AND
St. Martin’s Press
New York
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Table of Contents
About the Author
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PART ONE
MAKING SENSE OF THE
INEQUALITY DEBATE
CHAPTER ONE
WHO CARES ABOUT INEQUALITY?
THE DEFINING CHALLENGE OF OUR TIME?
A few years ago, one of the authors of this book, Yaron Brook, was invited to
give the keynote address at the Virginia Republican Party State Convention.
Here’s how he started.
I was not lucky enough to be born an American citizen. I became an American citizen by choice. I
immigrated to this country. I was born and raised in Israel. I served in the Israeli military where I met
my wife of twenty-seven years. And when we got married, after we had fought for our country, we sat
down and said, you know, you only live once and we want to make the most of our lives, we want to
be someplace where we can enjoy freedom, where we can make the most of the life that we have,
where we can pursue our happiness, where we can raise our children to the best of our ability. And we
looked around the world. We weren’t committed to any particular place, so we looked around the
world and we said, “Where are we going to go?” We chose this country because America is the
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greatest nation on earth, and really is the greatest nation in human history.
Of all the questions Yaron considered before he made his decision, one that
never came up was how much economic inequality there was in America. Like
millions before him, Yaron came to America seeking to make a better life for
himself and his family: he wanted to experience the American Dream, in which
he would be free to set his own course and rise as far as his ability and ambition
would take him. Would that put him in the top 1 percent or the bottom 10 percent
of income earners in America? It would never have occurred to him to ask, and
if someone had asked him, his answer would have been: “Who cares?”
Yaron is not unique in this regard. Polls consistently show that inequality is
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very low on Americans’ list of concerns. Even people who live in rural
Michigan and struggle to make their mortgage payments apparently don’t care
that, hundreds of miles away in New York, a handful of hedge fund managers fly
on private jets and dine at Nobu. What we do care deeply about is the
opportunity to make a better life for ourselves—and we are more likely to
celebrate the fact that this allows some people to succeed beyond their wildest
dreams than lose sleep over it.
But hardly a day goes by in which we aren’t told that our attitude toward
economic inequality is wrong—that even if we don’t care about inequality in and
of itself, we should care, because it threatens the American Dream. In one of his
most celebrated speeches, President Obama declared that “the defining challenge
of our time” is “a dangerous and growing inequality and lack of upward mobility
that has jeopardized middle-class America’s bargain—that if you work hard, you
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have a chance to get ahead.”
Obama is hardly a lone voice on this issue. Nobel Prize–winning economist
Joseph Stiglitz writes of “the large and growing inequality that has left the
American social fabric, and the country’s economic sustainability, fraying at the
edges: the rich [are] getting richer, while the rest [are] facing hardships that
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[seem] inconsonant with the American Dream.” Journalist Timothy Noah warns
that “income distribution in the United States is now more unequal than in
Uruguay, Nicaragua, Guyana, and Venezuela, and roughly on par with
Argentina. . . . Economically speaking, the richest nation on Earth is starting to
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resemble a banana republic.” French economist Thomas Piketty, in his
celebrated work, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, warns that “capitalism
automatically generates arbitrary and unsustainable inequalities that radically
undermine the meritocratic values on which democratic societies are based,” and
so “the risk of a drift toward oligarchy is real and gives little reason for optimism
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about where the United States is headed.” The bottom line, according to
Obama, is that the “combined trends of increased inequality and decreasing
mobility pose a fundamental threat to the American Dream, our way of life, and
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what we stand for around the globe.”
In his 1931 book The Epic of America, James Truslow Adams introduced the
phrase “the American Dream” into the lexicon, referring to “that dream of a land
in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with
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opportunity for each according to ability or achievement.” The American
Dream is about opportunity—the opportunity to pursue a better life, where one’s
success depends on nothing more (and nothing less) than one’s own ability and
effort, and where, as a result, innovators can come from nowhere to spearhead
limitless human progress.
On the face of it, that dream would seem to entail enormous inequality: in a
land where there are no limits on what you can achieve, some will earn huge
fortunes, many will earn a decent living, and others will fail for one reason or
another. Yet critics insist that economic inequality is at odds with the American
Dream. Their specific arguments vary, but they all boil down to three general
claims: in one way or another, inequality conflicts with economic mobility,
economic progress, and fairness.
1. Inequality vs. Mobility. The best proxy for opportunity, according to the
critics, is economic mobility. There are different ways of assessing mobility, but
however you measure it, they say, the fact is that if you’re born poor in America,
chances are you’ll stay poor, and if you’re born rich, you’ll probably stay rich.
Some critics argue that rising inequality is a result of the same forces that are
limiting mobility, such as the decline of unions or the minimum wage. Others
paint inequality as a cause of declining mobility—citing, for instance, the ability
of affluent Americans to send their children to exclusive schools that poorer
parents cannot afford. In many cases, the connection between rising inequality
and declining mobility is never fully spelled out: we are simply told that, for
instance, the highly unequal United States has less economic mobility than our
counterparts in Europe, and that we can increase mobility by molding ourselves
in the image of European social welfare states.
2. Inequality vs. Progress. According to the critics, economic inequality is at
odds with economic progress. The dominant view is that the last forty years have
been marked by a startling rise in income and wealth inequality, as the rich got
richer and the poor and middle class stagnated. Some argue that this rising
inequality is a telling symptom of underlying economic problems, such as tax
and regulatory policies that favor “the rich.” Others claim inequality causes
economic progress to slow, citing statistical correlations between high inequality
and lower growth. Explanations for how inequality slows growth are all over the
map, ranging from the claim that it reduces consumer spending, supposedly the
driving force of economic growth, to the claim that inequality makes workers
less happy and therefore less productive.
3. Inequality vs. Fairness. One of the reasons we value opportunity is that it
reflects our commitment to fairness. We believe that a person’s level of success
should be tied to merit, and that if you lie, cheat, or steal—or simply make dumb
decisions—your “privileged position” shouldn’t protect you from failing. But
rising inequality, the critics claim, is at odds with fairness.
Sometimes the claim is that inequality undermines fairness by giving “the
rich” the power to rig the political system in their favor. “Ordinary folks can’t
write massive campaign checks or hire high-priced lobbyists and lawyers to
secure policies that tilt the playing field in their favor at everyone else’s
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expense,” President Obama tells us. In other cases, the claim is that rising
inequality is the result of injustice. According to Stiglitz, “Too much of the
wealth at the top of the ladder arises from exploitation. . . . Too much of the
poverty at the bottom of the income spectrum is due to economic discrimination
and the failure to provide adequate education and health care to the nearly one
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out of five children growing up poor.”
Often, however, the underlying message is that economic inequality, at least
beyond a certain point, is inherently unjust. In Obama’s words, “The top 10
percent no longer takes in one-third of our income [as they did prior to the
1970s]—it now takes half. Whereas in the past, the average CEO made about 20
to 30 times the income of the average worker, today’s CEO now makes 273
times more. And meanwhile, a family in the top 1 percent has a net worth 288
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times higher than the typical family, which is a record for this country.” These
ratios, the president assumes, are self-evidently unjustifiable.
Whatever account any given critic endorses, the conclusion is always the
same: if we care about the American Dream, we have to reduce inequality by
propping up those at the bottom and by bringing down those at the top. And so
along with proposals to increase the minimum wage and bolster unions, the
inequality critics also advocate top marginal income tax rates well above 50
percent, huge taxes on inheritances, vast amounts of regulation designed to
restrain big business, salary caps on CEO pay, and campaign finance laws to
constrain political speech by the wealthy, to name only a few of their schemes.
In Piketty’s runaway bestseller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the chief
proposals for fighting inequality are an annual global wealth tax of up to 10
percent a year, and a self-described “confiscatory” top marginal income tax rate
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as high as 80 percent.
For some, even this doesn’t go far enough. There are critics of economic
inequality who are largely indifferent to its impact on opportunity and want to
level down society even if it means crippling economic progress. In their popular
critique of economic inequality, The Spirit Level, Richard Wilkinson and Kate
Pickett tell us that “we need to limit economic growth severely in rich
countries,” because “[o]nce we have enough of the necessities of life, it is the
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relativities which matter.” Similarly, bestselling author Naomi Klein argues
that to truly deal with the problem of inequality, we must reject capitalism
altogether, give up on the idea of economic progress, and embrace a
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decentralized agrarian form of socialism. Left-wing radio host Thom
Hartmann will settle merely for banning billionaires: “I say it’s time we outlaw
billionaires by placing a 100% tax on any wealth over $999,999,999. Trust me,
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we’ll all be much better off in a nation free of billionaires.”
SHOULD WE BE SUSPICIOUS OF INEQUALITY?
The inequality critics paint a bleak picture of modern America—one so bleak
that many of us do not recognize it in our daily experience—and offer up
solutions that many of us find deeply troubling. But at the same time, these
critics are addressing issues of profound concern, and their claims come backed
by seemingly persuasive evidence: statistics, studies, and books by some of
today’s leading intellectuals and journalists. We want America to be a land of