Wealth Gap
U.S. Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal (D–WA) claims that “the wealth gap in this country” was “built by policy,” and “it can be dismantled by policy” like “raising the minimum wage” and “strengthening our unions.”
IN FACT, Jayapal supports policies that have fueled the wealth gap by impoverishing working Americans, and her plans could make them poorer. Here are the specifics:
- She supports government money printing, which is the primary driver of inflation and expands the wealth of current asset holders while making homes, stocks, and other investments less affordable for everyone else.
- She supported the American Rescue Plan, which stoked the worst inflation in 40 years with $1.9 trillion in deficit spending mainly for social welfare programs and bailouts for state and local governments and private union pension funds.
- She supported Covid-19 lockdowns that swept away more than 20 million jobs, fueled inflation, and caused multitudes of deaths through missed medical care, depression, substance abuse, anxiety, school closures, and other collateral damages.
- She supports expanding government social programs that reduce incentives to work and the ability to save.
- She supports pervasive government regulations that raise the costs of living and make it difficult for small businesses to compete with major corporations.
- She supports mass illegal immigration that reduces the wages of low-income workers and decreases the prices of services that high-income people purchase, like maids, nannies, landscapers, and restaurant meals.
- She supports green energy mandates that increase the costs of energy and virtually everything else.
- She supports government-mandated employee benefits that reduce workers’ wages.
- She supports monopoly powers for unions that raise taxes and consumer prices.
- She supports liberal ethics about sex, which create household fragmentation that dilutes workers’ incomes and is strongly associated with poverty.
- She supports increases in K–12 education spending, which raise taxes while failing to substantially improve student achievement.
- She supports canceling student loans, which raises the costs of college and disproportionately benefits higher income people.
- She supports raising the federal minimum wage to $15, which will destroy jobs, spur inflation, and give 81% of the resultant salary increases to families above the poverty line while raising the average income of families below the poverty line by about 1%.
Wealth is not a fixed pie, and the rich getting richer doesn’t necessarily mean the poor get poorer. Nevertheless, Jayapal and her fellow progressives often complain about wealth inequality without acknowledging that the only span in modern history in which it declined was the three pre-Covid years of Trump’s first term. In this period, real median family wealth rose 3% for whites, 33% for blacks, and 65% for Hispanics.
