Steven Pearlstein

“‘Americans strongly support the concept that nobody who works should be without the basic necessities of life,’ said Mark Penn, former president Bill Clinton’s pollster. But outside that framework, people don’t want to see policies whose primary purpose is to redistribute income.

‘We don’t like the idea of government taking something that belongs to someone and giving it to somebody else,’ said Michael Graetz, a Yale Law School professor who has written a book on the income tax. But at the same time, there is also a vague feeling that what the economy is producing in terms or rewards is not always in accordance with what people deserve.

Sidney Verba, a professor of government at Harvard University, noted that in the United States more than in any other industrial society, there is the feeling that income gaps between rich and poor are legitimate. Verba recalled studies showing that members of even the most left-wing groups in the United States were willing to accept larger income gaps than top business executives in Sweden, which imposes higher tax rates to fund a more expansive welfare state.”