Tag Archives: equality

Fair Share and Economic Mobility

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Much has been made, in the last few years, of an apparent increasing concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, while the poor get poorer.  One result of this has been a demand that the rich should pay more taxes; they should pay “their fair share.”  Another result has been a general objection to the increasing wealth of those who are already wealthy; there should be a general redistribution of their wealth to the poor.

In addition to attempting to define what “their fair share” should be, it’s also useful to explore whether the wealth disparity in the US is really all that bad.

Let’s look first at the question of “fair share.”  I’ve written elsewhere that in 1999, the top 10% of Americans, by income, paid 66% of the total income taxes collected by the Federal government, while the bottom 50% paid 4% of the total; in 2008—after the Bush tax cuts that so favored the rich—the top 10% of Americans’ share had increased to 70% of the total income taxes, while the bottom 50%’s share had decreased to 3% of that total.  With the richest Americans’ share of the tax burden increasing, already, what is their “fair share?”

Further, when we look at actual income vs. taxes, we see this in 2008—again, after those Bush tax cuts “for the rich;” the disparity is even more startling.  The top 1% by income, who earned 20% of the total income in the US, paid nearly 40% of the total taxes paid by Americans.  That bottom 50%, who paid those 3%, actually earned nearly 13% of the nation’s total income.  Again, what is the “fair share” of the rich?  I suggest it’s already been met, and more.

Still, were the concentration of wealth and the associated wealth disparity static, there might be a valid beef, if only from the practical standpoint that such stationarity would contribute to stagnation in our economy, at the cost of continued improvement in well-being for us all.  But when we look at income mobility, we see no such stationarity.

When we look at minimum wage earners, for instance, we find that adults who earned at minimum wage levels over the period 1998 through 2006 did so only relatively briefly.  Then, rather than losing their income altogether, they moved on to better paying jobs.

We can look at this another way, too.  According to the Treasury Department’s “Income Mobility in the US from 1996 to 2005” report, the children of today’s poverty-level family are part of the next generation’s middle class families.  Today’s poor young man is tomorrow’s middle-aged middle class man.  Indeed, “80 percent of taxpayers had incomes in quintiles as high or higher in 2005 than they did in 1996, and 45 percent of taxpayers not in the highest income quintile moved up at least one quintile.” Further, the median incomes of those in the lower quintiles increased more than did the median incomes of the higher quintiles.  Not only are today’s poor a different group of people than yesterday’s, today’s poor are better off in absolute terms than were yesterday’s poor.

The movement runs both ways, as it must: relative movements are a zero-sum game.  Not only is yesterday’s poor man not today’s poor man, because yesterday’s poor man has gotten better off, relatively as well as absolutely, yesterday’s rich man is not today’s rich man: he’s lost ground relatively as well as absolutely.  “Among those with the very highest incomes in 1996—the top 1/100th of 1%—only 25% remained in this group in 2005….  [T]he real median income of these taxpayers declined over this period.”  It’s broader than that, too: 30% of those in the top quintile in income in 1996 had fallen to the next lower quintile by 2005, and nearly 3% had fallen all the way to the bottom quintile.

It seems that demands for the rich to pay “their fair share” are redundant; they already are.  It’s that bottom 50% that seems to be underpaying their “fair share.”  Further, demands for the class warfare of wealth redistribution would seem to be aimed at a moving target.  Our free market economy already is redistributing wealth, as Americans earn their way out of poverty, or lower middle class, or middle class, and enter those better off groups.  Demands to take wealth away from the rich are demands to take property away from those who’ve only just earned it with a lifetime of hard work and sweat.  And they are demands to deny that property to the children of these only newly successful.

Political Correctness and Jim Crow

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I was taking my daily exercise walk through the neighborhood this morning and had an interesting conversation with a passing motorist.  Since it’s a residential area, I was moseying along in the street, and the motorist stopped and asked why I didn’t like the sidewalk (no snark; he was just curious).  The salient part of the conversation went like this:

Me: “Just habit.  Usually my wife and I walk together, and when we talk, there’s much hand-waving and elbow-flying.  The sidewalk isn’t wide enough for us.”

He: “Oh, you’re Italian.”

Me: “Nah.  We’re American.”  (OK, some leg pulling here.)

He: “No, I meant your heritage is Italian.”

Me: “Nope.  American.”

He: “I get that.  I was asking about your ethnicity.  All that hand stuff, and all.”

Me: “Yeah—like I said, American.”

This completely innocent conversation—the motorist really was just curiously asking about something that seemed entirely natural for him to ask about—illustrates how far we’ve slipped into the mess that is the Politically Correct.  We no longer think of ourselves as Americans.  We think of ourselves, instead, as part of this or that group first, and we just happen to be American, second.  We’re African-Americans. We’re Asian-Americans.  We’re Hispanic-Americans.  We’re XYZ-Americans.  We insist on these group break outs of our American-ness, as though all there is to being an American is the legal citizenship of the country to which we belong, and every difference, however minor, needs anxiously to be preserved.

But we don’t just separate ourselves on ethnicity or skin color.  We segregate along other equally useless lines.  We’re Catholics, first, and Americans second.  Or Protestant.  Or Baptist.  Or Muslim.  Or Jewish.  Or Atheist.  We’re rich, or poor, and American second; union or non-union, and American second.  In a sort of reverse artificial segregation, we can’t hold back a student who isn’t progressing in his studies because keeping him back might “stigmatize” him.  So he’s passed forward, anyway, in a reverse segregation.

This is nothing more than the preservation of the Jim Crow era’s segregation and separate but equal…claptrap.  Today’s segregation, though, is far more insidious than that era’s openly separate water fountains, restrooms, schools for which those Jim Crow Democrats of 50 years ago fought so desperately.  Today, we have “affirmative action” that seeks to give preferential treatment to government-selected groups, not on the basis of merit, but solely on the basis of belonging to the right group.  We have outright quotas, where selection is based solely on belonging to the right group: the process doesn’t even pay lip service to merit.

In the end, this PC-driven segregation accomplishes nothing but the soft bigotry of low expectations about which Bush the Younger spoke some years ago.  Although he was referring specifically to education, this low expectations nonsense is far broader than that.  This soft bigotry justifies government welfare for those “special” groups: government believes the members of these groups cannot—ever—help themselves, an individual in one of these groups cannot—ever—make the right choices, without government handouts and “guidance”  In the end, this PC-segregation serves no other purpose—intended or not—than to keep these government “favored” groups trapped in the Liberal company town, paying for their government welfare with their votes—there being no other product in the company store than dependency, and no other currency for that store’s white goods than the scrip of those votes.

We aren’t Americans who have differing beliefs—which diversity contributes to our greatness as a nation and makes our culture what people of other nations want to immigrate to join.  We aren’t Americans with differing skin tones—which differences gives us a breathtaking range of beauty.   Instead, we are those differences, first and foremost.  That’s the argument, anyway, for Political Correctness.

On second thought, PC is far worse than Jim Crow.

Update: For an additional take on the racist nature of Affirmative Action, see this article from The Wall Street Journal by Ward Connerly, president of the American Civil Rights Coalition and author of “Lessons from My Uncle James: Beyond Skin Color to the Content of our Character” (Encounter Books, 2008).

Equal Outcome and Equal Opportunity are Equally Moral?

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Senator Marco Rubio (Rep, FL) spoke on the floor of the Senate last August; a recording of that speech was posted by Senator Rubio here: This Debate Will Continue.  I agree with almost all of his words, but there is one critical passage with which I must take issue, albeit at a late date.

Senator Rubio said (these words can be heard beginning at about the 5:20 mark of his roughly 10 minute recording),

One the one hand, there are those who believe that the job of government is to deliver economic justice, which basically means an economy where everyone does well or as well as possibly can be done.  There’s another group that believes in the concept of economic opportunity, where it’s not the government’s job to guarantee an outcome but to guarantee an opportunity to fulfill your dreams and your hopes.

One is not more moral than the other; there are two very different visions of the role of government in America.

Senator Rubio has fallen for the siren song of moral equivalency: one group’s belief is as valid as another’s on the sole basis that each group has a belief.  Yet these two positions—equal outcomes and equal opportunities—are not at all morally equivalent; one is plainly immoral from its inception.

John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and many others, have shown that all men have an inalienable right, a right inherent in a person’s very existence, to an exclusive property in their bodies and minds, their labor, and the fruits of their labor.

Our Declaration of Independence acknowledges this in so many words,

[A]ll men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

John Adams pointed out, as he wrote Massachusetts’ 1780 Constitution, that “Happiness” is nothing more, or less, than this:

All men are born free and independent, and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights, among which may be reckoned the right of enjoying and defending their lives and liberties; that of acquiring, possessing, and protecting property; in fine, that of seeking and obtaining their safety and happiness.

So, what does it mean that government will guarantee equal outcomes, or substantially equal outcomes, for all?  How can government guarantee this?  The only way this is possible is for government to give something to the less successful to bring them to the same level of outcome as the more successful.  Government, though, has nothing of its own; it must first acquire what it intends to give, and it can acquire only by taking from those enjoying greater success.  Yet this taking can only reduce that very success; government, of necessity, must circumscribe the success of one group in order to “improve” the lot of another.

This only saps the morality of both groups, though.  It teaches the less successful that they do not have to work as hard, they do not have to acquire skills to the same degree, as the more successful: they do not have to work to the fullest of their own potential.  Equal outcomes teach the less successful that they can rely, instead, on government to make up any shortfall.  Equal outcomes give those receiving a portion of the others’ success a measure of dominion over those others by asserting for the recipients that claim on those others’ property.

This outcome redistribution, by circumscribing the result of effort, also teaches the more successful: there is little point to effort; government will simply take much of what they have earned and give it away.  This deprecates success and thereby reduces incentives to work, to seek success.  This combination of one group not having to work hard and the other group not caring to work hard reduces the outcomes for all.

Equality of opportunity, though, guarantees to each member of our social compact that chance to work to our own maximum potential, free of the threat of government confiscation.  This ability to keep what we have earned, to dispose of the fruits of our labor in accordance with our individual imperatives, combined with the knowledge that we are responsible for our own futures, that none of us can claim a portion from another, combine to provide ample incentive to each of us to work hard and to live our lives to their fullest.

Further, that equality of opportunity is central to our morality: each of us is responsible for our own actions.  All of us must work to our own capabilities, not to the capabilities of others; all of us are morally obligated not to assert any claim on the produce of others.

Equal opportunity, not equal outcomes, gives each of us the fundamental equal right to fulfill our own potential without outside interference.  This equal opportunity is the grand implementation of our rights and liberties  that are acknowledged, and the fulfillment of our moral needs that are implied, in our Declaration of Independence.

In the end, the only way government can guarantee equal outcomes is to guarantee equal poverty.  This is a direct violation of our endowment of fundamental equality, it reduces all of us to government dependents, and it removes from us our morality—including our explicit Judeo-Christian teachings, which also are implied in the principles identified in our Declaration of Independence—and transfers that morality to government.

By guaranteeing equal opportunity, however, government leaves us true equality—our ability, each of us, to reach the fullness of our individual potentials.  The quality of life we gain from this, the confidence we gain from achieving our successes on the basis of our own hard work and our own struggles, reinforces the morality that we also now retain—to see, ourselves, to the least among us, rather than running from that responsibility into the comfort of government dependency.