Mar
10
Blog post #5 Nicholas Lee
March 10, 2015 | Leave a Comment
There is no doubt that income inequality is extremely prevalent and alive here in New York City. As described in Mayor DeBlasio’s “Tale of Two Cities” 2013 mayoral campaign, the crisis of income inequality was “at the very center” of his vision for New York and one of the major issues facing our city. How one goes about trying to resolve this issue though is another question to bare. The solutions and opinions on this topic are extremely polarized as some people like Mayor DeBlasio believe in raising taxes and creating social welfare projects to combat the inequality while others like Ed Glasier from the Daily News article believe that New York should “celebrate” this wealth inequality.
In the Daily News article “A happy tale of two cities,” Glasier raises an interesting perspective on the issue of income inequality in our city that our inequality is a result of our success and not our failure. Glasier argues that income inequality is ancient and it is the very nature of large cities that there will be income inequality, attracting both rich and poor people alike with the prospective of wanting to make money. He also argues that by Mayor DeBlasio making the public sector far more “generous,” it will attract even more people to come to the city and thus increase the gap.
In some ways, I do agree with Glasier that big cities like New York attract people of all backgrounds and natures with the hope of making money and because of this there will always be income inequality. In other ways, I still disagree that we should “celebrate” this inequality and on his argument that we should not increase our social welfare programs in fear that it will increase the gap in New York. Regardless if the income gap is happening in New York or in some other part of the country, the fact is that even if it wasn’t in New York, the income gap would still exist somewhere in the country and this raises the question of how policy makers can actually combat the issue instead of just moving it somewhere else. In the article, Glasier seems to dismiss the idea of increasing social programs but doesn’t seem to raise any other solution to fix the problem except “getting the basics of city government right.”
In the article by James Pethokoukis, he also offers an interesting point of view on how we can combat this issue. In his article, James Pethokoukis also agrees that cities and some geographic areas by far are doing economically better off that other parts of the country and in turn, so do their housing markets. Interestingly though, his reasoning being is that many of these well off areas are “brain hubs” that attract innovative technology companies and “smart” workers within a high density of one another. For the most part, these “smart” workers are well off financially and act almost like a magnet, drawing in more opportunities and job openings. According to Pethokoukis, it creates a “multiplier affect” with each hiring from one of these cutting edge technology companies creating five new job openings in other local services. What this means is that this not only benefits those companies but also benefits the society as a whole through increased tax revenues and through innovation that would be an asset to everyone. If we could get into the mindset of encouraging many of these companies that benefit society as a whole, then maybe we would be able to fix this gap in income inequality. Smart people from all over the country would be attracted to these areas and we would be able to fix this society.
