Robert Reich is a former US Labor Secretary in the Clinton administration and a well known political liberal. He has a regular brief opinion segment on National Public Radio and also publishes this on his blog. This week his commentary was entitled “Democrats Should Talk About Inequality.”
He asserts that inequality in the US is greater today than at any time since the 20′s and by some measures since the 1890′s. I don’t have any information to either contradict or confirm this claim. However what I find interesting is that he automatically associates inequality with injustice and tax policy -
The American economy has been growing nicely. Corporate profits are up. Top executives are raking in eight-digit compensation packages. But the paychecks of most people haven’t budged. Median household earnings are actually below what they were in 1999. Meanwhile, the costs of energy, health insurance, and college tuitions are skyrocketing.So don’t be surprised if you hear lots of Democratic candidates and maybe even a few Republicans talk about restoring fairness to the economy. That means at a minimum: rolling back the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, raising the minimum wage, lifting the ceiling on earnings subject to Social Security payroll taxes, and cutting taxes on the middle class. The new political motto: It’s fairness, stupid. [emphasis added]
I think that constructive public debate on this subject deserves more than this kind of (apprently) philosophically biased perspective. Precisely where morality and justice intersect with economic inequality is a question that needs some careful thought, not just unexamined assumptions.
I’m not convinced that inequality per se is fundamentally a moral problem, though it certainly may reflect a moral problem. Poverty, on the other hand, is plainly a moral problem when it results from factors outside an individual’s control and others have an ability to alleviate it. But I am not convinced that a progressive tax system is necessarily the most effective way to overcome poverty. I need to write more on this sometime, but it’s a bigger subject that I’m going to do justice to right now. Suffice to say for now that I believe that the responsibility of the wealthy to show compassion to the poor extends well beyond charity to include a responsibility for investing in businesses that create jobs.
I have submitted some comments to Reich’sblog entry, which I hope will show up in due course once he has read them.