Tags: income | Obama | work | pay

Stephen Moore: No President Obama, Poor People Don't Work as Hard as Rich

By    |   Tuesday, 09 June 2015 04:57 PM EDT

Here's an interesting take on income inequality that bucks conventional wisdom.

While President Barack Obama claims that low-income Americans work just as hard as their wealthy counterparts, that simply isn't true, says Stephen Moore, a distinguished visiting fellow at The Heritage Foundation.

"Yes, many people in poor households heroically work very hard at low wages to take care of their families, no doubt about that," he and Heritage Foundation research associate Joel Griffith write in The Washington Times.

"Yet the average poor family doesn’t work nearly as much as the rich families do. And that’s a key reason why these households are poor."

Census Bureau data show that for every hour worked by those in a low-income household, those in a wealthy household toil five hours.

"The idea that the rich are idle bondholders who play golf or go to the spa every day while the poor toil isn’t accurate," Moore and Griffith explain.

"The finding that six out of 10 poor households have no one working at all is disturbing. Since they have no income from work, is it a surprise they are poor?"

Meanwhile, Americans are concerned about the growing inequality of income, but they don't see the government as a solution for the most part, according to a new study by four esteemed professors for the Washington Center for Equitable Growth.

"The survey shows that while respondents who view information about inequality are more likely to believe that inequality is a serious problem, they show no more appetite for many government interventions to reduce inequality — with the notable exceptions of increasing the estate tax and the minimum wage," the professors write.

They are Ilyana Kuziemko of Princeton University, Michael Norton of Harvard, Emmanuel Saez of the University of California, Berkeley and Stefanie Stantcheva of Harvard.

"Our working hypothesis is that those surveyed alighted on the estate tax because it applies to many fewer Americans than respondents had assumed," the authors say.

"And respondents favored increasing the minimum wage because doing so does not necessitate heavy government involvement"

Bottom line: "The survey reveals a deep mistrust of the federal government’s ability to administer programs effectively and efficiently even after confronted with the importance of these programs in alleviating poverty among those Americans at the bottom of the ladder," the professors concluded.

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StreetTalk
Here's an interesting take on income inequality that bucks conventional wisdom. While President Obama claims that low-income Americans work just as hard as their wealthy counterparts, that simply isn't true, says Stephen Moore.
income, Obama, work, pay
384
2015-57-09
Tuesday, 09 June 2015 04:57 PM
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