Accounting for inequality by Jill LePore in The New Yorker, March 16, 2015
Income inequality is greater in the United States than in any other democracy in the developed world. The evidence that income inequality in the United States has been growing for decades and is greater than in any other developed democracy is not much disputed. It is widely known and widely studied.
Political scientists are nearly as likely to study economic inequality as economists are, though they're less interested in how much inequality a market can bear than in how much a democracy can bear, and here the general thinking is that the United States is nearing its breaking point.
Last year, when the Pew Research Center conducted a survey about which of five dangers people in forty-four countries consider to be the "greatest threat to the world," many of the countries polled put religious and ethnic hatred at the top to their lists, but Americans and many Europeans chose inequality.
What's new is that American politicians of all spots and stripes are talking about it, if feebly: inequality this, inequality that. The reason Democrats and Republicans are fighting over who's to blame for growing economic inequality is that, aside from a certain amount of squabbling, it's no longer possible to deny that it exists.
The growth of inequality isn't inevitable. But, insofar as Americans have been unable to adopt measures to reduce it, the numbers might seem to suggest that the problem doesn't lie with how Americans treat one another's kids, as lousy as that is. It lies with Congress.
“The game is rigged and the American people know that. They get it right down to their toes.” That’s Elizabeth Warren talking, the former consumer advocate and law school professor and now a Democratic senator from Massachusetts.
- See more at: http://www.sobabyboomer.com/2014/04/do-we-need-another-massachusetts-senator-for-our-next-president.html