Reducing inequality
How much?
The extreme income (and other) inequalities in the United States and the world are not inevitable. However, efforts to address income inequality must confront ideologies justifying inequality as the natural (and hence fair) outcome of individual differences in skills, talents, and effort, ignoring structural causes. Some analysts have suggested that the poorest deciles could receive a larger share of income and much improved life prospects without seriously diminishing the life prospects of the wealthiest 10 or 20 percent.
While reducing income inequality in the United States might reduce overall GDP growth, it could find justification from contemporary liberal conceptions of justice if it resulted in sustainable improvements in major indicators of well-being, such as the health, educational, and employment prospects of the less-advantaged part of the population. Philosophers such as John Rawls have argued that, so long as basic human rights are respected, social policies that bring the least advantaged up to a minimum level of income and other social goods should be more acceptable to impartial persons than alternatives that benefit the better off while hurting those who are worse off.
Defenders of current levels of income inequality must show that some more-fundamental moral norm, such as a libertarian right to private property, takes precedence over the right to a minimum level of income security and opportunity. Or they must show empirically that any policies designed to reduce inequality will so reduce efficiency and total income that the share for the least advantaged would be smaller than what it is currently.
How?
Policies to address income inequality can focus narrowly on individual skills, opportunities, and aspirations or may focus more broadly on altering the social, political, and economic structures that create and maintain income inequality.
Policies that indirectly reduce income inequality
Income distribution is affected indirectly by patterns of taxation and ownership. Overall economic inequality is affected by policies that provide public goods, such as health care and education, leaving a larger proportion of individuals’ incomes to be spent on other goods.
Wealth redistribution through steeper inheritance taxes, promotion of broader ownership (e.g., greater worker ownership), and socialization or redistribution of capital and land equally to all citizens are ways to reduce income inequality indirectly, as they will equalize the unearned income that derives from ownership of wealth. Enforcement of affirmative action and nondiscrimination policies by employers, governments, and educational institutions and policies such as government-subsidized child care that enable people to enter the labour market should also affect income inequality through facilitating greater access to higher-income jobs. Globally, debt forgiveness and reform of trade agreements so that they do more to benefit the least advantaged in each country can reduce income inequality and other forms of inequality, averting a race to the bottom.
Policies that directly reduce income inequality
Income inequality can be reduced directly by decreasing the incomes of the richest or by increasing the incomes of the poorest. Policies focusing on the latter include increasing employment or wages and transferring income.
The range of employment-related policies includes strengthening collective-bargaining rights, full-employment schemes, living-wage policies, stronger minimum-wage laws, and wage subsidies. Direct income-transfer policies include traditional means-tested and conditional cash welfare payments. There is also renewed interest in unconditional transfers such as a negative income tax and non-means-tested universal basic income.
On a global level, there are various proposals to generate revenue (such as the Tobin tax on financial transactions or a global tax on resource use) that could be used for direct income transfers as well as for other forms of development assistance to reduce poverty and inequality. Because of continued global instability and environmental degradation linked to inequalities in income and other resources, such policy efforts will continue to be critical not only for ethical reasons but also for the sake of national security and global survival.
