The Truth About Income Inequality

“The issue of wealth and income inequality, to my mind, is the greatest moral issue of our time,” said presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.).

- David R. Henderson

Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich claims that “great wealth amassed at the top” will cause us to lose democracy. To fight economic inequality, presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.) is calling for a 2 percent annual tax on household net worth between $50 million and $1 billion and a 3 percent tax on net worth above $1 billion.

Language like that and proposals like Warren’s make increasing inequality sound like a crisis. But they misread the situation and misdiagnose the underlying problems.

On a global scale, inequality is declining. While it has increased within the United States, it has not grown nearly as much as people often claim. The American poor and middle class have been gaining ground, and the much-touted disappearance of the middle class has happened mainly because the ranks of the people above the middle class have swollen. And while substantially raising tax rates on higher-income people is often touted as a fix for inequality, it would probably hurt lower-income people as well as the wealthy. The same goes for a tax on wealth.

Most important: Not all income inequality is bad. Inequality emerges in more than one way, some of it justifiable, some of it not. Most of what is framed as a problem of inequality is better conceived as either a problem of poverty or a problem of unjustly acquired wealth.

MEASURING INEQUALITY

FIRST, THOUGH, LET’S look at how much inequality there is. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) produced a report in November 2018 on the growth of household income in each of five quintiles. Between 1979 and 2015, average real income for people in the top fifth of the population rose by 101 percent, while it rose for people in the bottom quintile by “only” 32 percent. For the middle three quintiles, average real income increased by 32 percent as well.