Inequality has emerged as a major issue in the US and beyond. A generation ago it could reasonably have been asserted that the overall growth rate of the economy was the main influence on the growth in middle-class incomes and progress in reducing poverty. This is no longer a plausible claim.
The share of income going to the top 1 per cent of earners has increased sharply. A rising share of output is going to profits. Real wages are stagnant. Family incomes have not risen as fast as productivity. The cumulative effect of all these developments is that the US may well be on the way to becoming a Downton Abbey economy. It is very likely that these issues will be with us long after the cyclical conditions have normalised and budget deficits have at last been addressed.
President Barack Obama is right to be concerned. Those who condemn him for “tearing down the wealthy” and engaging in un-American populism are, to put it politely, lacking in historical perspective. Presidents from Franklin Roosevelt to Harry Truman railed against the excesses of a privileged few in finance and business. Some have gone beyond rhetoric. Confronted with rising steel prices, John Kennedy sent the FBI storming into corporate offices and is widely thought to have ordered the authorities to audit executives’ personal tax returns. Richard Nixon used the same weapon in 1973, announcing tax investigations “of the books of companies which raised their prices more than 1.5 per cent above the January ceiling”. All were reacting in their own way to a phenomenon that Bill Clinton has described best: “Although America’s rich got richer . . . the country did not . . . the stock market tripled but wages went down.”