From the Stating the Obvious Department at the OECD:
The gap between rich and poor has grown in more than three-quarters of OECD countries over the past two decades, according to a new OECD report.
OECD’s Growing Unequal? finds that the economic growth of recent decades has benefitted the rich more than the poor. In some countries, such as Canada, Finland, Germany, Italy, Norway and the United States, the gap also increased between the rich and the middle-class.
Countries with a wide distribution of income tend to have more widespread income poverty. Also, social mobility is lower in countries with high inequality, such as Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States, and higher in the Nordic countries where income is distributed more evenly.
I’d like to draw your attention to these two particular paragraphs:
In developed countries, governments have been taxing more and spending more on social benefits to offset the trend towards more inequality. Without this spending, the report says, the rise in inequality would have been even more rapid.
But new ways of tackling this issue need to be found, Mr Gurría said. “Although the role of the tax and benefit system in redistributing incomes and in curbing poverty remains important in many OECD countries, our data confirms that its effectiveness has gone down in the past ten years. Trying to patch the gaps in income distribution solely through more social spending is like treating the symptoms instead of the disease.”
Naturally, of this will be ignored. Just you watch. “Deregulate! More fun with derivatives! We can police ourselves! Yay, economic freedom!” On the other hand, it keeps people from forming anything approaching lasting emotional attaches to their governments, so its not all bad. Its kind of hard to respect or honour people who keep fucking you over.
The PFLD 