David Brooks in the NYT today promotes Stuart Butler's plan for reforming the health insurance system. Skepticism is advised, on political grounds. The principle political obstacle holding back an efficient and fair benefit system is public fragmentation. Some of us get most benefits from the government- some of us get them from the private sector (with help from the government that often goes unrecognized). And most people don't want to lose what they have, even if it might be for a better deal later on.

In his Washington Post column this week, Bob Samuelson abuses Census Bureau's Income, Poverty, and Health insurance Coverage in the United States 2006 to launch a critique of immigration policy. The gist of his "reasoning" is this: From 1990 to 2006, the number of poor people increased by 2.9 million people. In those same years, the number of poor Hispanic people increased by 3.2 million while the number of poor whites and blacks and fell by 0.6 million and 0.8 million respectively. If we subtract out the increase in poor Hispanic individuals from the increase in the total number of poor individuals, we are actually left with a net decrease in the number of people in poverty from 1990 to 2006. Ergo, satisfactory progress has been made in poverty remediation, and flawed immigration policies are primarily responsible for strained social services, health care, and public education systems. Why is it important to get this story straight? One reason is truthfulness. It's usually held that we've made little, if any, progress against poverty. That's simply untrue. ... We shouldn't think that our massive efforts to mitigate poverty have had no effect. Immigration hides our grudging progress. A second reason is that immigration affects government policy. By default, our present policy is to import poor people. This imposes strains on local schools, public services and health care. Samuelson, however, is simply peddling statistical misdirection and obfuscation.

It's a truism that Americans don't really seem to mind that inequality has increased so dramatically over the last three decades. After all, few policies have been enacted to reverse this trend, and American public opinion has generally become more conservative on fiscal policy. But in significant ways, public opinion studies don't support this truism. The public mostly opposes growing inequality, a fact that has held steady for the least three decades, with some variation in scope and intensity.

An article from The Guardian with some interesting ideas on how to reduce inequality, rather than just arrest its growth. Note the outrage expressed over the disparity between CEO and average worker pay in Britain, which is modest by U.S. standards.