Group items tagged

what can policy do to limit inequality? The answer is, it can operate on two fronts. It can engage in redistribution, taxing high incomes and aiding families with lower incomes. It can also engage in what is sometimes called “predistribution,” strengthening the bargaining power of lower-paid workers and limiting the opportunities for a handful of people to make giant sums.

We can see this in our own history. The middle-class society that baby boomers like me grew up in didn’t happen by accident; it was created by the New Deal, which engineered what economists call the “Great Compression,” a sharp reduction in income gaps.

Obamacare provides aid and subsidies mainly to lower-income working Americans, and it pays for that aid partly with higher taxes at the top. That makes it an important redistributionist policy — the biggest such policy since the 1960s.

The evolving Olympic athlete - 200m freestyle swim Since the advent of the modern-day Olympics in 1896, athletes have redefined limits in pursuit of the Olympic ideal: "Faster, higher, stronger." Through a combination of training, better regimen and technology, they've continued to advance their sports -- shattering records along the way. The graph below shows the progression of gold medalists' times for the 200-meter freestyle swim since 1896. Use the zoom controls at the top right to get a closer look, and hover over the points to learn each year's result. While zoomed, click and drag the timeline to view later years.