Why Our Record Inequality?

 Financial FAQs

“Why are we the only developed country without universal health care, tuition free public college, mandated paid vacations and paid child leave, among other benefits, all major indicators of social well-being? We should not need a Michael Moore documentary, such as his latest Where To Invade Next, to tell us what we either no longer provide to our citizens or that cost more?” H Green/Huffington Post

CIA World Factbook

I first wrote a version of this column in 2016, on seeing what I consider to be Michael Moore’s best documentary, Where to Invade Next, a portrait of what other countries have taken from us that we no longer provide for our own citizens, a better standard of living

Nobelist Robert Shiller lamented this fact in a recent New York Times Upshot column. "Economic inequality is already a concern, but it could become a nightmare in the decades ahead, and I fear that we are not well equipped to deal with it."

In fact, the latest CIA World Factbook statistics have told Americans for years that we have a very unequal society; in fact the greatest income inequality in the developed world.

The US is ranked 102nd in the Gini inequality index of 145 countries that the CIA measures for income distribution. Only China of major countries is lower. Even Russia has less income inequality.

And it is this statistic that best highlights the social benefits that all Americans no longer enjoy. For instance, US residents going to public colleges and universities paid no tuition until the 1970s, making a university education prohibitively expensive. 

Another measure that helps to smooth out income inequality is an adequate national minimum wage, which is still $7.25 per hour in many states that did not enact a higher minimum wage of their own, whereas Australia’s national minimum wage, a country with similar demographics, is $16 per hour for a full time working adult.

Why aren't we equipped to deal with it? Dr. Shiller and even Angus Deaton co-discoverer with wife Ann Case of the exploding drug and suicide rates of non-college educated white adults, commenting on what he called the "grotesque expansions in inequality of the past 30 years," gave a pessimistic prediction: "Those who are doing well will organize to protect what they have, including in ways that benefit them at the expense of the majority."

And that has happened since the 1970s and the dominance of free market, so-called Laissez Faire ideologies that strove to cut taxes and government regulations for the sole purpose of protecting the wealth “at the expense of the majority” which has resulted in the election of Donald Trump twice.

Yet we do know how to level the playing field. We should reenact the labor laws of earlier years that allowed collective bargaining and disallowed the right to work laws in 25 states where a mass exodus from unions occurred with the loss of manufacturing jobs that paid higher wages and salaries. Then raise the income tax rate that prevailed before President Reagan succeeded in lowering taxes of the wealthiest 70 percent of Americans.

We could also pass real universal health coverage that all other countries enjoy. It would lower health costs--maybe to what it is in other developed countries, which is 50 percent less than Americans currently pay.

So, we do know how to enact economic programs that create a more equal society. European countries have succeeded via higher tax rates but provide many more services and at much cheaper costs than so-called private enterprise.

Private enterprise has been allowed to decimate the public good to such a degree that the CIA World Factbook showed an unpleasant fact; we are in danger of becoming a developing country in the company of other Third World, developed countries once again.

And because of it, the CIA announced this year the Trump administration is no longer allowing its publication, in a vain attempt to hide the damage over the last 30 years that such income inequality has done to our democracy.

Harlan Green © 2026

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