Income Inequalitys Ripple Effect
Meanwhile, dirt poor Christians will continue to believe what Fox News tells them.
Last week, Barack Obama, delivering the clearest and most powerful economic policy speech of his presidency at an event sponsored by the Center for American Progress, identified the combined trends of increased inequality and decreasing mobility as the defining challenge of our time. The week before, in his first papal exhortation, Pope Francis robustly criticized trickle-down theories of economic growth as having never been confirmed by the facts and as leaving behind the poor and vulnerable. Soon after being awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics, Robert Shiller told the Associated Press that inequality was the most important problem that we are facing now today.
These concerns are serious. For the last three decades, the U.S. economy has been growing dramatically more unequal and less mobile by nearly every measure. The fact is that we dont know nearly enough about what high inequality means for economic growth and stability. We need a better understanding of how inequality affects demand for goods and services and macroeconomic and financial imbalances. We are in the dark on whether and how inequality affects entrepreneurship, or whether it alters the effectiveness of our economic and political institutions, or how it affects individuals ability to access education and productively employ their skills and talents.
Meanwhile, dirt poor Christians will continue to believe what Fox News tells them.