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 percent 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.
