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Comment by kevin_b_er | Hacker News Reader

This is the standard of Trickle-Down Economics. The goal is to concentrate money at the top and permit a small portion to trickle down.

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Interestingly, the US States with the highest levels of inequality often have some of the most progressive taxation and government policies. New York and Connecticut at the top. Alaska, Utah, and Wyoming at the bottom: https://www.zippia.com/advice/states-highest-lowest-income-i...

I haven't dug into your stats, but Alaska has the 46th smallest economy and Wyoming the 49th. They don't really have enough of an economy by US standards to have high wealth disparity.

New York is #3.

Connecticut is and exception at #23, but I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of it is finance commuters from Wall St. In New York.

While there are exceptions, that list seems to correlate pretty well with the list of states ranked by GDP.

While probably intentionally non committal, I think your post is still a bit misleading.

You are indeed correct that inequality is correlated with GDP. But interestingly, it's also correlated with median GDP per capita (Connecticut is #1 there iirc). Basically, it counters the assumption that "higher inequality == worse condition for the average folk". I saw a graph that plotted both together, I'll see if I can dig it up.

"Median GDP per capita?"

Do you mean median income?

In that case I think comparing Texas would be a good fit instead perhaps?

No sense adopting the progressive tax codes when inequality isn't a huge factor

Progressive taxation causes income inequality

Everywhere has poor people, but places with progressive taxation and gov policies have lots of rich people too.

Which would be a problem if the economy were a zero-sum game, but it's not, so the share of wealth for the X percent isn't extremely meaningful.

I don't see a reason to say it should be frozen in time at whatever level it was in 1978 or progress to a utopia where every single person earns the same (or where every X percentile of people owns exactly X percent of the wealth).

This isn't to say that the current system is helping people, but pointing at this particular chart doesn't seem to do any justice to the idea of why life might be worse for the average US citizen. We could just as well reverse course and have a chart where income tends toward total "equality" and still make the world a living hell. I believe in our ability to do that.

We've never tried Trickle-Down Economics as a single country. For as long as it's been a driving economic policy globalization has meant that the bottom is a 3rd world country somewhere rather then whichever country was practicing it.

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