Deliberate and ….

Chart of the Day: America’s 30-Year Project to Make the Rich Even Richer – Here’s a remarkable chart from EPI..  (hat tip rjs)

Actually, no: Strike that. It’s true that in a normal world it would be remarkable, but in the world we live in it’s actually totally unsurprising. It illustrates the rise in income inequality over the past three decades (top dark blue line), and as you can see, it’s been rising steadily. Totally unsurprising. But then author Andrew Fieldhouse did another calculation. The middle blue line shows rising inequality after you account for taxes and transfers. But what if we had the same tax system we did in 1979? Well, inequality still would have gone up, but it would have gone up significantly less (bottom light blue line). In other words, during an era in which the rich were getting richer anyway, we deliberately set out to reduce their tax burdens so that they could become even richer.