it all washes, until the conclusion

Economic Life After College - New York Times -- Here's an NYT opinion piece talking about the new distributions of earnings among our population. The facts are compelling. The researchers conclude, though, that "only a reorientation of government policy can restore general prosperity." I suggest that they are too short-sighted, or looking to the wrong source for change.

The reorientation will come from us, not from the government. As a matter of fact, the government is going to be one of the things experiencing an imposed change, not the agent of change. As a matter of fact, one of the main ways we can redistribute income is to take our money back from our governments, not from our high earners; we've allowed "the nation's [political] leaders" to concentrate assets in the wrong places, with the wrong players, for the wrong reasons, and they are not the most appropriate or apt brokers of the assets. Taking the government out of the mix will probably reshuffle the high earners, but it won't exact redistributive penalties on them. Taking the government out of the mix will probably result in more fairness in the redistributions, too.

Go to the NYT for the basic research findings.