Biden boosting ‘equality’ in US by making everyone poorer

The latest Census Bureau report on income and poverty could hardly have been grimmer.

The US “supplemental poverty rate” (a new measure that takes into account government benefits and expenses related to working) rose over the course of a year.  

The child-poverty rate doubled.  

Almost every group — old people, young people, males, females and residents of every region of the country — lost ground. 

There were virtually no bright spots.  

Indeed, the middle class got hammered. Median household income fell by 2.2%. 

The average family is roughly $2,000 poorer than when Biden entered office.  

This followed a more than $6,000 rise in middle-class incomes under Trump.  

Biden’s miserable results during his first two years in office are an entirely predictable consequence of his enacting more than $5 trillion of new debt spending — which sent inflation soaring to nearly 8%.  

Very few workers received 8% wage increases to keep up with the cost of living. 

Just ask the UAW strikers. 

There was one quirky piece of “good news” for White House progressives obsessed with “income inequality.”

The income gap between the rich and poor has narrowed, according to several standard measures of income inequality.

The so-called Gini Coefficient — a standard measure of that spread — showed a reduction in inequality.

The ratio of the total income of the top decile of earners to that of the bottom decile fell — by 10%. 

How did that happen? Not by making the poor richer.  

We now have an all-time high of 38 million Americans living in poverty.

Instead, the incomes of the rich fell at a faster pace than the incomes of everyone else.

Biden says he’s abandoned “trickle-down” economics.

And he has: Now there aren’t higher incomes to trickle down for anyone.

Everyone is getting a smaller slice of a smaller pie.

Instead of JFK-style aspirations of a rising tide that lifts all boats, we now have a falling tide that is capsizing all boats — but the big yachts have sunk more than the row boats.  

Biden has accomplished this through his radical income-redistribution plan, which puts equality over prosperity.

First, he’s raised taxes on the richest Americans; second, he’s redistributed $1.2 trillion per year of taxpayer money to the poor via anti-poverty programs without any requirements that the recipients work. Free money.

This is a recipe for making a nation poorer.  

It’s simple math. First, every dollar that the government takes in taxes from the rich reduces their incentive to produce.

The higher the tax penalty, the greater the disincentive to work. 

Meanwhile, every dollar that is given to the poor (and not related to working) reduces the incentive to produce for those at the bottom.  

So, the overall size of the economic pie keeps shrinking, and the more the politicians try to equalize income through taxes and subsidies, the fewer the number of rich and poor alike who will work.  

Just look at the historically low level of the labor-force participation rate.  

Biden and the Democrats have responded to the rise in poverty by arguing that we should return to COVID-era federal policies that handed out large cash benefits (such as checks of up to $3,600 per child) to families that are poor.  

They seem to think that if we make the checks large enough, there will be no poverty in America. 

But wait. If we give every family $30,000 (without requiring work), how many Americans with a wage and salary below or anywhere near that level would stop working in order to receive the freebie benefits?  

This is what we call the “paradox of equality.” 

The Holy Grail of perfect equality leads inevitably to everyone becoming poorer and more miserable.  

The latest Census report is a warning that Biden has put us well on that road to ruin.  

Arthur Laffer, president of Laffer Associates, and Stephen Moore, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, are co-founders of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity.