Hello I'm Anastasia Yuglova, your host for today's Cato Daily Podcast. It is Tuesday, February 13th.

For today's episode, I cover the topic of this month's debate at Cato Unbound, our online monthly magazine.

Gary Bertless and Mark Toma have already contributed their essays to the debate on income

inequality, to be followed by Richard Berghouser, Krueger, and Fabrizio Perry.

Cato Senior Fellow Alan Reynolds, who authored the lead essay on the topic, discusses his

controversial conclusions about income inequality on our podcast today.

Ben Bernanke has stated that although average economic well-being has increased considerably

over time, the degree of inequality in economic outcomes has increased as well. How is he wrong?

Notice he said that it's happened for 30 years at least and he starts off with 1979.

He's right about the period from 79, 80, 81, on to about sometime between 86 and 88,

but not since then.

In other words, if you take two years like 79 and 2004 and draw an imaginary line between them you see a 25 30 year

increase in point of fact that increase happened in the first eight and hasn't

happened since to me that's a kind of a distinction. We like to know what happened when.

So what are the big issues here in your essay on Cato Unbound?

The Cato Unbound essay, I mean, I start with a book called Income and Wealth,

and I wrote a couple of Wall Street Journal articles and I tried to summarize that very quickly and some of that stuff in the Cato Unbound piece.

First off, I spent a whole chapter of the book saying you cannot use income tax data to estimate income distribution.

That's true of the study by Pickettie and Saez.

That's true of the Congressional Budget Office.

Those were two Wall Street Journal articles in their own right.

And then I go on to say, if you don't use the tax data, most of the other data shows no increase in the inequality of income or consumption or wages. That one's a little trickier.

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