Links - True Unfairness
Fairness is a slippery yet important concept.
Jeffrey Singer and Josh Bloom write,
Not a month goes by without one or both of us receiving emails from desperate people pleading for help finding a physician willing to take new pain patients − a task that has become next to impossible.
Increasingly, these pleas are not just about pain management but about finding ways to end their lives, as years of forced reductions or complete discontinuation of the opioid painkillers that previously allowed them to function have left them bedridden, in constant severe pain or both.
Many have become “pain refugees,” seeking doctors who will accept new pain patients. These are not addicts seeking a fix; they are ordinary people who suffered an accident or serious illness. They once had full, productive lives but now face unimaginable agony.
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The public, with help from the news media, still believes the myth that prescription painkillers are responsible for the overdose crisis. This is demonstrably false.
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The impact on the sick and powerless is staggering. One pain refugee cut off from medicine asked one of us if we knew how to test her street-bought pill − she took a small dose and vomited for 24 hours. A terminal cancer patient entered hospice, where doctors denied her oxycodone, causing pain and withdrawal. A mountain-climbing athlete was disabled by a serious accident and, now with brain cancer, sought advice on suicide due to unbearable nerve pain.
These are a few examples of the cruelty caused by the CDC’s misguided medical interference − an agony beyond most people’s comprehension. Even this tiny sample reveals the unimaginable torment caused by the CDC’s flawed foray into medicine.
To say this is unfair is to significantly downplay it. Through our government’s policies, we are perpetuating brutal injustice causing grave unneeded pain.
For some reason many of us cannot see this or at least won’t allow ourselves to see it.
Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised as everywhere I look I see people who cannot properly understand things from a fairness perspective.
To take a topical example, consider taxes.
To assess tax fairness requires more than a simplistic comparison so typical of what is offered by those with a political ax to grind. It requires a bit of numeracy on the part of the audience. Unfortunately, most people are too lazy or innumerate to see through the problem.
As Adam Michel writes,
Two questions should interest policymakers. First, did the tax change make individuals at different incomes better off, and by how much? Second, how did the tax reforms change the distribution of who pays how much tax (looking at the share of taxes paid, did the tax code get more progressive)?
The most often cited statistics on the share of total tax change by income group tell policymakers nothing useful about either question. When pundits say, for example, that 65 percent of the 2017 tax cut went to the top 20 percent of income earners, they are telling us nothing about people’s well-being or how the reform changed the distribution of taxes.
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Because the US tax burden is highly skewed toward upper-income taxpayers, any broad-based tax cut will follow a similar distribution. The top quintile of income earners was projected to pay 67 percent of the total federal tax burden absent the 2017 reform. The same group was projected to receive 65 percent of the 2017 tax cut’s benefit. A smaller tax cut share in relation to the underlying tax burden means the tax cuts were actually biased toward the lower-income groups.
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The distribution table statistics are primarily driven by the existing underlying distribution of the tax burden. Because higher-income Americans pay the vast majority of the income taxes, it means broad-based tax cuts will mechanically result in a similar distribution of the total tax cut. It also means that any reduction in lower-income tax burdens will be a meaningful tax cut simply because their starting tax burden was already comparatively low.
Image five people in a group paying for pizza. The pizza’s total is $110 including a $10 delivery fee (analogous to a tax). Suppose initially the biggest eater (analogous to the highest income person) would be paying $50 and everyone else would each pay $15. However, before paying we discover a coupon for free delivery. How do we change the payment to be “fair”?
Well, keeping the distribution the same—a big assumption on what fairness means as the biggest payer might be due more of the savings since he is already shouldering most of the burden—would imply the big eater pays $45.45 (he gets 50/110ths of the $10 savings or $4.55). That leaves the other four to pay $13.64 each (their savings is each 15/110 times $10 or $1.36).
If Bernie Sanders is watching, he’ll scream, “BUT THAT BIG EATER (billionaire) GOT ALMOST HALF OF THE SAVINGS! THREE TIMES MORE THAN ANYONE ELSE! NOT FAIR!”
Obviously Bernie is being innumerate. The savings just went in proportion to what each was already paying.1
Sometimes determining fairness means doing some logical reasoning. Yet other times it just requires us to consider what the end result should resemble. If not in detail, at least in general. And sometimes, as in the case at the top with people in physical pain, it simply requires us to hold fast to a principle of do no harm.
What might not be fair is that the big eater is paying more than three times anyone else. Is he going to eat over three times as much?