The Myth of American Inequality

by Phil Gramm

this doesn’t sound like the America you live in, that is because it’s not. There are at least three dead giveaways to the fact that the official measurements of the economic well-being of Americans are wrong. The most obvious clue is that from the ramp-up of funding for the War on Poverty in 1967 to 2017, annual government transfer payments to the average household in the bottom 20 percent of the income distribution rose more than fourfold in inflation-adjusted dollars from $9,677 to $45,389.6 And yet the official poverty measures tell us that the percentage of people living in poverty hardly changed during that fifty-year period.