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It Takes “Alternative Math” to Claim That Redistribution Is Futile
Adam M. Finkel at RegBlog:
It Takes “Alternative Math” to Claim That Redistribution Is Futile: The unequal distribution of costs and benefits across society is one of the hottest topics in the regulatory arena—and one that, regretfully, has sparked fundamentally flawed arguments, threatening to distort and obscure much-needed discussion about redistributive policies. …
Although all policies have redistributive effects, some ideologies are viscerally, even militantly, opposed to government interventions that benefit the poor, whether by intention or even as a side effect of an otherwise sound policy. …
In a recent New York Times op-ed, University of Illinois at Chicago Professor Deirdre McCloskey exemplifies this type of argument, in conspicuously misguided fashion. In her column, McCloskey offers a litany of reasons as to why progressive taxation and other policies aimed at redistributing benefits to the poor are ill-advised. At the core of the essay, McCloskey makes the empirical assertion that such policies cannot actually make much of a difference in any event.
Unfortunately, the basic mathematics of McCloskey’s claim are mangled. She may not prefer that we seek progressive tax and regulatory policies, but her claim that these policies do not “uplift the poor very much” is erroneous. That the Times has decided not to correct her error—even in the face of an email exchange in which the author herself acknowledged her mistake—may be an example of how tempting it is to ascribe black-and-white factual issues to the realm of “healthy controversy.” …
As with many of the toxic myths about regulation—that, for example, it is responsible for destroying countless jobs while failing to create any new ones in the process, or that it relies on gross exaggerations of risk and plays to irrational public fears—we are lost without the ability to distinguish between ideological responses to facts and ideological twisting of facts into nonsense. …
Source: http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2017/03/it-takes-alternative-math-to-claim-that-redistribution-is-futile.html
