We read so you don’t have to: CEA Chair Alan Krueger’s inequality speech

[ProSense]

We read so you don’t have to: CEA Chair Alan Krueger’s inequality speech

Posted by Ezra Klein

This morning, Alan Krueger, the chairman of the President’s Conuncil of Economic Advisers, gave a speech on inequality at the Center for American Progress. Prepared remarks here. Charts here. These are the parts that caught my eye:

- “I used to have an aversion to using the term inequality. The Wall Street Journal ran an article in the mid-1990s that noted that I prefer to use the term ‘dispersion’. But the rise in income dispersion – along so many dimensions – has gotten to be so high, that I now think that inequality is a more appropriate term.”

- “As the Congressional Budget Office noted in a recent report, the top 1 percent of families saw a 278 percent increase in their real after-tax income from 1979 to 2007, while the middle 60 percent had an increase of less than 40 percent.”

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- “We can’t go back to the type of policies that exacerbated the rise in inequality and threatened economic mobility in the first place if we want an economy that builds the middle class. This means that we must adequately regulate excess risk-taking and corrupt practices in financial markets. It also means that we can’t go back to tax policies that didn’t generate faster economic growth or jobs, but rather increased inequality. Instead of going backwards, we should adhere to principles like the Buffett Rule, which states that those making more than $1 million should not pay a lower share of their income in taxes than middle class families. We should also end unnecessary tax cuts for the wealthy, and return the estate tax to what it was in 2009.”

- “Restoring more fairness to the economy would be good for all parts of American society. This is not a zero-sum game. The evidence suggests that a growing middle class is good for the economy, and that a more fair distribution of income would hasten economic growth. Businesses would benefit from restoring more fairness to the economy by having more middle class customers, more stable markets, and improved employee morale and productivity.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/we-read-so-you-dont-have-to-cea-chair-alan-kruegers-inequality-speech/2011/08/25/gIQAlma9tP_blog.html

[MrCoffee]

1. If you need help finding more sites linking to the same speech, let me know

It never hurts to have more links, right?

[ProSense]

2. I

"If you need help finding more sites linking to the same speech, let me know"

...do. Please let me know what you find. Thanks in advance.