I’m up again in the middle of the night (ah, life with small children), so I might as well blog, right? This bit of snark from Mark Thoma caught my attention.
It would be nice to move the bottom of the US distribution up since it’s a bit of an outlier for countries with average income in the vicinity of ours. But that might require raising taxes on the wealthy and redistributing income, or at least using the money to try and improve the conditions that lead to this outcome. That would then cause the people at the upper end of the distribution to quit working hard and taking risks, people would stop innovating, and our entire society would devolve into socialism ending our way of life as we know it. So, sorry, nothing we can do.
Click through for the graphs. I’m too tired to reproduce them here and I trust Thoma to keep them safe for me. They provide some nice ways to examine income distribution in the U.S. versus many other industrialized nations.
