Engine of Inequality

Chapter 11Financial Policy for an Equitable Future

Life is both complex and intense, and the tremendous changes wrought by the extraordinary industrial development of the last half century are felt in every fiber of our social and political being.… The conditions which have told for our marvelous material well-being, which have developed to a very high degree our energy, self-reliance, and individual initiative, have also brought the care and anxiety inseparable from the accumulation of great wealth in industrial centers. Upon the success of our experiment much depends, not only as regards our own welfare, but as regards the welfare of mankind.… There is no good reason why we should fear the future, but there is every reason why we should face it seriously, neither hiding from ourselves the gravity of the problems before us nor fearing to approach these problems with the unbending, unflinching purpose to solve them aright.

– Theodore Roosevelt*

How then to approach inequitable financial policy to solve it aright? It has been the purpose of this book to show American economic inequality as the chasm it has so quickly become, marshaling convincing data to lay clear the depth of the divide between the few whose wealth grew ever greater after 2010 and the many with scant resources not only to secure daily comforts before COVID, but also to shield themselves from the pandemic's ferocious effects. I have also shown that, while monetary and regulatory policy is not inequality's ...