# What's wrong with income inequality if everyone is well off?

**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-wrong-with-income-inequality-if-everyone-is-well-off/938044
**Category:** Great Debates
**Created:** [March 16, 2021, 8:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-wrong-with-income-inequality-if-everyone-is-well-off/938044 "2021-03-16T20:42:17Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 133

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### Author: ![DavidNRockies](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/davidnrockies/32/6279_2.png) [@DavidNRockies](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DavidNRockies)
#### Post date: [April 3, 2021, 2:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-wrong-with-income-inequality-if-everyone-is-well-off/938044/133 "2021-04-03T14:50:41Z")

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Totally agree.

The 'temporarily embarrassed millionaire" syndrome 😉

I point to a thread I started as particularly on-point here:

> [@Do the rich pay their fair share?](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-the-rich-pay-their-fair-share/921817):
>
> I did a quick search and found very little specifically about this. In association with the latest story about DJT’s tax returns, I heard a statistic that the wealthiest Americans pay an average of 24% in Federal Income Tax. I presume they’re talking about [Effective Tax Rate](https://www.thestreet.com/personal-finance/taxes/what-is-the-effective-tax-rate-15102865). But Effective Tax Rate reminds me of an old joke in medicine: The surgery was a complete success, but the patient died. Sometimes, our definitions differ from the definitions used by others. According to [Pew Research](https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/10/06/a-closer-look-at-who-does-and-doesnt-pay-u-s-income-tax/): …

And a recent article (paywalled ?) that gives context:

> **[The richest 1 percent dodge taxes on more than one-fifth of their income,...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/03/26/wealthy-tax-evasion/)**
>
> Those at the very top of the income spectrum deny the U.S. government roughly $175 billion a year in revenue, researchers estimate.

> The richest Americans are hiding more than 20 percent of their earnings from the Internal Revenue Service, [according to a comprehensive new estimate of tax evasion](http://gabriel-zucman.eu/files/GLRRZ2021.pdf), with the top 1 percent of earners accounting for more than a third of all unpaid federal taxes.

And a charming little piece from “Freakonomics:”

> **[What The Bagel Man Saw (Published 2004)](https://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/06/magazine/what-the-bagel-man-saw.html)**
>
> Stephen J Dubner-Steven D Levitt article on accidental study of white-collar crime, as observed by economist named Paul F, who left research institute to sell bagels in office parks and, at 72, has thriving business in Washington area; his detailed...

> After retrieving his hearing aids, he heads for the bagel shop that provides him with roughly 50 dozen bagels, in six flavors, every day. He drives nearly 80 m.p.h. along empty highways and discusses what he has learned about honesty. He is leery of disparaging individual companies or even most industries, for fear it will hurt his business. But he will say that telecom companies have robbed him blind, and another bagel-delivery man found that law firms aren’t worth the trouble. He also says he believes that employees further up the corporate ladder cheat more than those down below. He reached this conclusion in part after delivering for years to one company spread out over three floors – an executive floor on top and two lower floors with sales, service and administrative employees. Maybe, he says, the executives stole bagels out of a sense of entitlement. (Or maybe cheating is how they got to be executives.) His biggest surprise? ‘‘I had idly assumed that in places where security clearance was required for an individual to have a job, the employees would be more honest than elsewhere. That hasn’t turned out to be true.’’

> Since he started delivering bagels, Paul F. has kept rigorous data – which, when run through a computer and measured against external factors ranging from the local weather to the unemployment rate, can tell some interesting stories. Other conclusions, meanwhile, are purely intuitive, based on Paul F.'s 20-year exposure to bagel behavior.

Maybe it’s time we put the lie to the pervasive mythology that the wealthy are wealthy because they’re smart, hard working, and came up with a better mousetrap while the poor are poor because they’re just stupid and lazy.

I’d vote for that.

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