http://www.nationalreview.com/node/425225/print Why We’re Never Moving Away from Income Inequality
A few thoughts on a futile project.
By Kevin D. Williamson — October 8, 2015
One of the weird little facts of life that we don’t think about or talk about very much — and really should when we’re talking about taxes, the minimum wage, welfare spending, and other things related to inequality of income and wealth (and go ahead and picture me here manfully resisting the urge to put sneer quotes around “inequality,” as if a uniform distribution of material resources were the natural state of things and not some daft dorm-room fantasy) — is that we pay for everything (really, everything) collectively.
Let me show you what I mean.
Housing is famously expensive in New York City, especially in Manhattan and the parts of Brooklyn where college-educated young white people live, a fact about which people in Muleshoe, Tex., don’t much care. But they should, because they pay for it. You might think that the people who pay for those $5,000-a-month apartments are all Wall Street jerks or highly paid publishing executives (all the highly paid publishing executives in New York put together wouldn’t fill one medium-sized apartment building) or celebrities who are too cool to live in Los Angeles, but you — you, sucker — you pay for them.
Costs get shifted around.
It goes like this: Say you have a software engineer who is really very good at what he does, and he’s living happily in Austin making $200,000 a year and eating delicious tacos, and he can afford all the delicious tacos he wants because $200,000 a year is a fair chunk of change in Austin. So when Company X in New York decides that it wants to hire him, and that it really needs him in its Manhattan office, it can’t get him for $200,000. This guy is a numbers guy, and he takes a look at the housing prices in New York, and the state and local income taxes — of which he pays a grand total of $0.00 per annum in Austin — and he knows from his last visit that nobody in New York knows how to make a decent taco, which is going to lower his standard of living still further, so he doesn’t want $220,000 or $245,832 — no, he wants $300,000, and a paid move, and an annual taco airlift.
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