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A boring and obvious way to get more rural votes

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A boring and obvious way to get more rural votes

Describe generic progressive economics as closing urban/rural disparities

Matthew Yglesias
Jan 31
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A boring and obvious way to get more rural votes

www.slowboring.com

Black and Latin Americans are significantly poorer, on average, than white Anglo Americans.

This is true pretty much any way you look at it. Median incomes are lower, poverty rates are higher. If you look at lists of the very richest people in the country, you see very few Black or Hispanic billionaires, and the few you do see are nowhere near the top of the ranking.

Because of this, essentially any policy that broadly redistributes material resources from the top to the bottom will tend to reduce racial inequality. Suppose you levy a wealth tax on fortunes of over $1 billion and use the money to cut flat checks to every citizen. Well, that reduces racial inequality because the class of billionaires is significantly whiter than the general population. But what if you enact a totally different kind of policy and levy a broad tax on consumption in order to finance a poverty-reducing child allowance? That also reduces racial inequality because the poverty and deep poverty populations are s…

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