Income Inequality

                                Income Inequality

Income inequality is a big deal in the press and among political panderers. "The issue of wealth and income inequality, to my mind, is the greatest moral issue of our time," said presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.)

Piketty and the Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez have estimated that, for the United States between 1979 and 2015, the top 1 percent's share of pretax income (including capital gains) increased from 9.0 percent to 20.3 percent. But in a 2018 paper, economists Gerald Auten of the U.S. Treasury Department and David Splinter of the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation came to a very different conclusion. To get a better measure of income, they accounted for all of national income, including unreported income, retirement income missing from tax returns, and income due to changes in the tax base that resulted from the Tax Reform Act of 1986. Their conclusion: Between 1979 and 2015, the share of pretax income going to the top 1 percent rose from 9.5 percent to 14.2 percent, and the share of after-tax, after-transfer income rose even less, from 7.2 percent to 8.5 percent.

What opinion is right? And how much of the world as we know it should we tear apart and restructure because of that opinion? And the larger question, whose right is it to make such a decision?