Looking Beyond the Tax System to Fight Inequality

In the context of last Tuesday’s State of the Union, Pavlina Tcherneva was interviewed by Wall Street Journal Live‘s Sara Murray on the issue of the effectiveness of policies to combat widening income inequality.

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In the interview, Tcherneva comments that while some of the progressive taxation policies outlined by the President may be part of the solution, we ought to be focusing more on raising wages at the bottom and middle of the income distribution through the promotion of tight full employment — with direct job creation policies playing a key role. She notes that the President’s proposal to create more infrastructure jobs would help on that front, but that we are still well short of full employment.*

Tcherneva memorably captured the increasing severity of the problem — economic expansions that have left the bottom 90 percent further and further behind — with the chart below. She lays out a brief summary of her alternative, “bottom-up” approach to fiscal policy in this one-pager: “Growth for Whom?”

*(Note that Tcherneva’s concept of tight full employment would ultimately bring the unemployment rate below what is conventionally understood as “full employment.” With a maximal job guarantee policy, anyone ready and willing to work would have access to a paid job in the public, nonprofit, or social entrepreneurial sectors.)