Inequality v Poverty

Joseph Stiglitz has an interesting post on the New York Times Opinionator blog pointing to Singapore as a role model for lessons on how the United States could achieve greater equality. Professor Stiglitz seems to be arguing for equal outcomes, or something close to it, and for income redistribution as a means of achieving it..

That may be a little unfair but I am reminded of the communist slogan "From each according to ability, to each according to need." That is presented in Acts of The Apostles as the idyllic life in the early church. We all know how it turned out in the last century when it was tried on a grand scale.

The authoritarian Lee Kuan Yew deserves a lot of credit for moving Singapore from third world backwater to the Asian Tiger it became on his watch. He was not a communist and he seems to have largely avoided the corrupting influence of autocratic power but Singapore is the exception rather than the rule.

I'm not sure why there has been so much focus recently on income inequality. I'm more concerned about poverty. It's true that middle class incomes have stagnated in the past few decades but it seems to me once people reach the middle class opportunities begin to open up. Until they do making progress can be really difficult.

Stiglitz points to the "startling 23%" of children in the United States who live in poverty and implies it is the result of a tax system that favors the rich. I'm surprised the percentage isn't higher. Most of those children live in single parent households. The really startling number is the  40% of American children, and the astounding 70%+ of black children, who are born to unwed mothers.

Sociologists have lately been pointing out the implications for the truly insidious cycle of poverty that ensues from those numbers, but their warnings have been falling on deaf ears. The NYC transit agency was excoriated recently for their ad campaign on the dangers of teen pregnancy. Until we address that issue, and it isn't just teens, no conceivable income redistribution scheme is going to have much effect.

Pope Francis I has come under a lot of criticism for his vigorous opposition to gay marriage as a threat to the family. I'm inclined to agree with Francis. I certainly agree  that the family is the vital foundation of a healthy society, and by that I mean the two parent family. The rise in single parent households is a greater threat to our society than gays will ever be. One parent can and often does successfully raise a family but when you add poverty to the mix the deck is stacked against all concerned.

As a community it is in our enlightened self interest to be doing everything in our power to break this cycle. We need these families to have better access to day care, better job skills for the bread winner, a growing economy to provide more and better jobs, better policing to provide a safe environment, better schools with lower dropout rates, and a thousand other structural improvements to help. Maybe more than anything else we need to encourage our children to finish high school and defer having children until after marriage.

It is a principle of Catholic Social Teaching that the first measure of any government policy is its effect on the poor and vulnerable. It isn't just because God sees it like that. We need these kids to grow up, join the middle class, become productive citizens, pay taxes, and support us geezers in comfortable retirement. If in the meantime a few people get filthy rich we can worry about income redistribution later.