Here’s an interesting finding. According to Gallup, three-fifths of Americans think that the distribution of income and wealth in the United States is unfair:
PRINCETON, N.J. — Despite the growing focus on inequality in recent years, the 63% of Americans who say that money and wealth should be more evenly distributed among a larger percentage of the people is almost the same as the 60% who said this in 1984.
Americans’ agreement that money and wealth need to be more evenly distributed reached a high point of 68% in April 2008, in the last year of the George W. Bush administration, and just before the full effects of the Great Recession began to take hold. Americans became slightly less likely to agree with the idea later that year and in surveys conducted in 2009, 2011 and 2013. This year’s increase to 63% is close to the average of 62% agreement across the 13 times Gallup has asked the question since 1984. The latest data are from Gallup’s April 9-12 Economy and Personal Finance survey.
Americans’ views on how money and wealth should be distributed in the country are strongly correlated with their partisanship and ideology. Agreement ranges from 86% among Democrats and 85% among liberals, down to 34% and 42% among Republicans and conservatives, respectively.
Two things occur to me on reading that. As usual, I’m more concerned about policy preferences than outcome preferences. I wonder how most Americans think that things might become more equal?
If you want to get the maximum effect, you’ll favor transfers from the richest to the poorest. It doesn’t do much about inequality if you transfer from the top 1% of income earners to others in the top 1% of income earners but, sadly, that’s been our policy for much of the last half century.
I think that’s easier said than done. Effective tax rates have been extremely persistent over a very long period of time so I’m skeptical it can be done via the tax systems.
The second thing that occurs to me is that I wonder if most Americans think that the large income disparity between themselves and, say, the Chinese people or Indians is unfair? The longstanding and widespread popular opposition to increasing foreign aid suggests we don’t a problem with it. Which makes me wonder about ideas of fairness.
