The Fantasy of Equality Part II

The game is rigged and it’s up to the good liberals to set it straight. The liberal heart pines for equality and there is but one way to achieve it: Get power and start meddling.  Of course, it’s all hokum.

 

 

1. People move up and down income brackets. According to a 2007 report from the U.S. Treasury Department, over half of individuals from 1996-2005, little changed since 1987, moved at least one quintile up or down. Perhaps most importantly, over half in the bottom income quintile in 1996 moved to a higher income group by 2005. The drop from the top quintile was even more dramatic. Other studies confirm:

 

 

 

Overall, income for everyone has risen, most dramatically for the lowest. The rich get richer and the poor get richer too. There is a false and destructive notion portrayed in everything from movies like “Wall Street” to the highest levels of academia and journalism: The notion that wealth is static. It is not. Look at the state of the nation just 100 years ago. By just about every measure—health, leisure time, food security, home size, transportation—things have improved substantially. The richest have gained the most in the last 20 years but if relative mobility is little changed and the median income has increased an inflation-adjusted 24%, why does that even matter?

 

And who are the rich? Trust fund babies? No. Largely, the rich are people who work for a living. One survey shows 86 percent of millionaires are self-made. Only about 14% of the top 1% work in finance. Most of the rest are doctors, lawyers, etc.  

 

       2. The increase in income inequality is about one thing: Marriage. The Gini coefficient, a measure of inequality, drops drastically when marriage is accounted for. It does so regardless of race. Fewer people are getting married these days. Too bad, because it is the key to building wealth. “Can Marriage Cure Poverty?”. The New York Times says yes.

 

Mona Charen notes that, according to the National Marriage Project, in the 1980’s, only 13% of children of mothers with a high school diploma or some college were born out of wedlock. Today it is 44%. W. Bradford Wilcox states that cohabitating couples “have a much higher break up rate, lower levels of household income, and a higher level of child abuse and domestic violence”. Marriage is becoming more correlated with education. The liberal elite instinctively grasps this yet they refuse to preach their own values to the poor. Charen writes, “Without the basics of permanence and security in their lives, people find it much more difficult to rise out of poverty or maintain middle class lifestyles. They are also far less happy. If you care about the poor and the middle class, you ought to worry about marriage”. The atrophy of traditional family is devastating for the long-term health of this nation. This is Mitt Romney’s fault.

 

3. The idea of poverty itself in this country is dubious. In America, the poor are obese from an abundance of cheap, tasty food. The notion that obesity is caused by “food deserts” is suspect at best. The American underclass is comparable in material standards to the middle class in places like France and Britain. According to a 2007 Heritage Foundation study taken from Census Data, 80% have air conditioning compared to 36% in 1970. Only 6% of poor households are over-crowded. Nearly 75% own a car and 62% have cable or satellite programming. Perhaps most shockingly, 43% of the poor own their own homes, typically a 3-bedroom, one-and-a-half bath, with a garage and a patio.

 

This is not to say that living in a bad area with bad schools, high crime, and little spending money is paradise. It is not. But “poor” in America does not mean dirty water, starvation, and malaria. “Poor” is a label, an almost arbitrary number. If you make $34,000/year, you are in the top 1% globally.

 

4. The left’s ideas for fixing inequality are bankrupt. Nancy Pelosi stated that three words prove her party is not out of ideas: Franklin Delano Roosevelt. But even most liberal economists believe his policies prolonged the depression. FDR’s treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. famously stated, "We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work”.

 

The current big idea is to raise the minimum wage. Many are claiming most studies say this will not hurt employment. Even if this were true, only 5% of minimum wage earners are below the poverty line. However, a 2007 Federal Reserve/UC Irvine meta analysis showed that almost all of the studies show raising the minimum wage kills jobs. The philosophical fathers of modern day liberals such as Woodrow Wilson’s Commisioner of Labor, Royal Meeker understood this. They devised the minimum wage as a  scheme to prevent black laborers from competing with whites. They believed that a whole underclass of inferior “germplasm” really shouldn’t be expected (or allowed) to work thereby, hopefully, decreasing their numbers. Meeker stated, “… better that the state should support the inefficient wholly and prevent the multiplication of the breed…” You see, before the Holocaust happened, eugenics was really popular among liberals.

 

Wages are not the problem. Jeffrey Dorman in Forbes states, “The entire bottom 20%…averages only 0.42 earners per household. People are not in poverty because the minimum wage is too low. People are in poverty because they are not working or not working enough. They need jobs, not an increase in the minimum wage”.

 

What about simply taxing the rich to redistribute wealth? Even France’s socialist president Francois Hollande is reversing course after seeing capital flee his country like rats on a sinking ship.

 

So yes, inequality in America exists. But is that a surprise when some work harder, are more ambitious, talented, beautiful or even lucky? Rather than artificially closing a meaningless gap, we should focus on increasing opportunity. In that, there is much the two parties could agree on. Unfortunately, many succumb to the tempting lie that they have less because the rich have more. Indeed, society seems to be built around temptation. For gluttony, there is McDonald’s. For lust, there is free internet porn. And for envy we have the Democrats.