Lifestyle & Individual Choice

With the President’s State of the Union address next week, the talk of income inequality and the so-called income gap persists. For those of you still convinced that the gap between high and low incomes is problematic, I’d like to encourage you to think about two concepts, lifestyle and individual choice.

Whenever you make such comparisons, it’s important to set aside extreme cases; they’ll always exist and they don’t prove anything. Even so, you’ll certainly find significant differences when you compare a typical family in the bottom 20% with one in the top 20%. What you won’t find at the bottom, however, is starvation and a lack of access to basic housing, education and health care. A plethora of government programs and EMTALA are there to ensure this, at least in theory. You might point out that poor Americans are more likely to go to poor schools. You’re right, but that’s a problem with government schools, a topic for another day.

When comparisons are made between the “rich” and the “poor,” government benefits such as these are rarely included. In fact, studies demonstrate that most poor American families have air conditioners, satellite or cable TV, a cell phone, and a car. I’m not suggesting that being poor in desirable, but the lifestyle of typical poor Americans family is a far cry from typical families in many of the world’s most populous countries. Those who claim that we have a collective responsibility to close the income gap rarely suggest sending dollars to Latin American, Africa, and Asia. Their sense of morality only includes those born in US territory.

This brings me to my second point. President Obama often refers to Americans who are poor “due to no fault of their own.” There might be a small group of such Americans, but statistics tell us that many in poverty choose single parenthood, abuse drugs or alcohol, and/or drop out of high school. These are choices, not mandates. Society is not to blame for such outcomes and not does it have any responsibility to redistribute wealth to soften the impact of poor individual decisions.

This is not to say that such people are not important. They are. However, opportunities to break out of poverty can be found in private charities and in the private sector. Studies estimate the amount spent on the so-called war on poverty exceeds $15 trillion, yet those on the left still clamor for more.

It’s not enough to complain about an income gap as if its existence is immoral. An honest discussion on incomes in America must consider the lifestyle of poor Americans relative to those in other countries, the failure of government anti-poverty programs, our approach to government schools, and the link between individual choices and income. I don’t expect the President to address these issues next Tuesday.

8 thoughts on “Lifestyle & Individual Choice

  1. Aren’t our lifestyle and individual choices product of the environment we live in?
    Thus, if we improve the environment we will be able to make better choices and embrace a healthier lifestyle.

  2. I am very suspicious of the arguments the President and others make. Seems like all solutions involve more transfers of wealth, more government programs and more dependence. I am not even mentioning the divisive class warfare rhetoric used. I try not to be cynical, but this ideology appears to guarantee one thing…more Democrat voters.
    I 100% agree Dr. Parnell…values and choices is a major if not the major contributor to the income gap. Read the Charles Murray book called “Coming Apart”. Imagine the power the President would wield if he talked about that personal responsibility side of the problem. But no, he just blames the rich and blames society, which just drives more wedges between us. He might find some common ground and possible compromise with opponents if he at least mentioned it.
    But the most important aspect is this…and I learned this from Dr. Tom Sowell…the notion of the income gap gets turned on its head when you look at actual flesh and blood people as opposed to generic classes of people. There is an enormous amount of mobility both up and down the scale in our country when you look deeper at the statistics. A simple concept to illustrate this is…when you are young and inexperienced you earn less…as you mature and gain skills and experience, you move up the income scale.

  3. But the environment has been poisoned by government. You get years of unemployment if you don’t work, single moms get $ for each baby they have, deadbeat dads never have to be identified, you get welfare if you don’t work, you get more government $ if your skills only get you a minimum wage job. Yeah, let’s change the environment. Vote the social engineers out of Washington and cut these programs. The environment will encourage more responsible choices.

  4. In the USA being poor as an adult is a choice. If you are born into poverty, you get free food, housing, health care and education, while these certainly are not the highest quality, they are there. Personal responsibility, hard work, determination and making smart choices (are you listening young women who don’t use birth control??), will elevate your standard of living which can pass on to your children and so on and so on…bad personal choices, poor parenting and dependence on the government will keep you right where you are which is also right where they want you. Uneducated, dependent voters = Government Utopia.

  5. If the government wants voters to remain uneducated and dependent, why did it pour on them $16 trillion? Don’t understand this conspiracy theory.

  6. Redistributing taxpayer funds creates dependency. The voters who receive them must elect politicians that will keep the money coming. They get so accustomed to programs like AFDC, low income college grants, medicaid, etc. that they start feeling entitled to them. Anyone who tries to rollback these programs is accused of stealing from the poor when all they want to do to steal less from the rich.

  7. Conspiracy theory?? It is actually happening all around you, they are buying votes with free stuff (education, health care, food, housing, cell phones, internet, etc). The scale of producers vs takers is very close to the tipping point. In 5-10 years when the producers get tired of giving their labor away, they will leave the country or join the takers. Or the takers will continue to give birth to children they expect the government to take care of and simply overwhelm the producers and then, my friends, our ship is sunk. Only our wonderful elected officials will see prosperity.

  8. Great point about the extreme cases. This is why the Left succeeds in convincing people we need more government. They will always be able to point to at least one more case in which things aren’t perfect. Because things will never be perfect. But this doesn’t stop them from using these extreme examples to make problems seem worse than they really are.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *