(Tom Toles)

The big topic that the big discussions love to talk around is wealth inequality. We are like the alcoholic that doesn’t want to admit we have a problem.

First it was ‘There isn’t sufficient evidence of growing inequality.’ Then it was ’Maybe it doesn’t matter as long as everyone is benefitting.’ Then it was ‘Maybe it matters to individuals, but it won’t have a negative impact on the economy as a whole.’ Then it was ‘Maybe it will affect the economy, but our political system can handle it.’ Then it was “There’s nothing we can do collectively, so get more education and you’ll be fine individually.’

The ‘more education’ solution always begged a couple of questions. Does it really do anything about inequality or does it just rearrange the individuals within the inequality. The other question is whether education even works at all in this equation.

That being said, education may not be any answer at all to wealth inequality, and there is some new evidence on that topic.

If you’ve borrowed a lot of money to improve your place in the economic distribution, and that didn’t pay off, then what? Then we are back to the question we’ve been avoiding all this time: our current policy of facilitating wealth inequality through our tax system. Our tax code used to be more progressive, and we had less wealth disparity. It’s not rocket science, it’s a policy choice. When we had higher marginal tax rates, there was less reason to jack up the high end of income. Now there is all the reason in the world.  “We have minimum wages, but there isn’t a wage ceiling,” an author of the report said. “There’s much more room for discrimination and inequality at the top. What’s happened is that the top one percent have really pulled away.”

Surprised? No, predictable.

Maybe we need to rebalance our economy to be more, um… balanced.