Hayward: The Dirty Little Secret of "Income Inequality"

One of the most basic problems with the whole 'income inequality' topic, writes John Hayward at Human Events, "is that people don't really understand what 'income' means any more. Do you really know what your precise weekly income is?" If you say either the 'net payable amount' or 'gross pay total' on your paycheck stub, you'd be wrong.

Citing numbers crunched by CATO Institute, Hayward notes that "much of the 'income inequality' battered about in the media is actually due to a rising share of income being delivered in the form of increasingly expensive health care benefits." As CATO's research reveals, the real problem isn't 'income inequality'—"the rich are getting richer slower than the rest of us are getting richer."

The problem is the government's stealth 'income diversion' from our paychecks:

[T]he whole idea behind paycheck withholding [is] grab those taxes before people even realize the money is gone. Very few of us have a clear idea of just how much of our money is “going,” or where it goes.