With the Russian hoax now behind us, the latest mantra filling the media vacuum is “income inequality,” writes Francis Menton in the Manhattan Contrarian. It’s front-page news again.

• Ray Dalio – the serious mega-billionaire and Co-Chairman of the country’s biggest hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates proclaimed on 60 Minutes that income inequality is a “national emergency.”
• New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, turned up in Nevada (of all places) to promote his self-delusional presidential campaign, and chose income inequality as his theme.
  
  [T]here needs to be a “bigger discussion about income inequality and oppression of other groups including Latinos, Native Americans, Asian and women,” he said at the event organized by the immigrant advocacy group Make the Road.

• Tucker Carlson, Fox News commentator: “The biggest problem this country faces is income inequality, and neither the liberals nor the conservatives see it.”

Francis Menton – a Problem with This

The “income inequality” mantra in the United States is almost as big a hoax as the Trump/Russia collusion scam. I say “almost” as big a hoax, because, unlike the Trump/Russia thing which did not exist at all, I am certainly not saying that there is no income inequality in the U.S. But multiple aspects of what you regularly read about the subject of income inequality in the U.S. are a hoax. For a more detailed discussion of some of these issues, see prior posts here and here.

Fake Data Supports Fake “Solutions”

But the public discussion of income inequality fundamentally proceeds from obviously fake data designed to exaggerate the issue to a ridiculous extent, and moves on from there to supposed “solutions” which have zero possibility of affecting “income inequality” as measured, and thus can only be seen as intentionally designed to fool the public into supporting yet another round of fake “solutions” that will again have zero possibility of working. That certainly makes this rise to the level of “hoax,” in my opinion.

The Income Inequality Scam

That part is that the proposed “solutions” to income inequality seem to always involve new government expenditures for redistributions that don’t count as income when the Census Bureau computes the statistics. Therefore, after a “solution” is implemented, the government is spending more money and has a bigger bureaucracy, but nobody’s income has actually increased. Meanwhile at the top, the proposed “solution” is always higher taxes — again, not counted when income inequality is measured.

I covered this subject in the October 2017 post linked above, that looked into how Mayor de Blasio was doing in alleviating the “income inequality” in his city that he had identified as the most important issue for him to address. His signature policies to address the problem were universal “pre-K” education, and additional affordable housing.

Anybody who follows this at all would immediately know that neither the value of pre-K education received, nor the value of an “affordable” apartment received, will ever be included in anybody’s income when measuring income inequality. Thus the possibility for either of these initiatives to move the needle on income inequality was exactly zero. And of course, about three years into de Blasio’s term, that was the result.

De Blasio’s 10^th Congressional District?

Even today, the New York 10 congressional district — home to myself and also Mayor de Blasio’s office at City Hall — remains the district with the highest measured income inequality in the country.

Much more from Francis Menton here.