Hello and welcome to the political orphanage, a home for plucky misfits and problem solvers.

I'm your host, Andrew Heaton.

Today we're going to talk about inequality.

I often state that I am more worried about the floor than the gap. So I don't particularly care about

inequality, I care about poverty. But we're not going to discuss the impact of inequality today,

or whether or not it's a moral evil or if inequality is worse than poverty or it causes poverty or vice versa.

All of the sort of inequality is bad or inequality is not bad we're covering today.

We're going to get very wonky.

We're going to drill down into how the American government defines inequality.

So I am bringing on a crusty old senator named Phil Graham to get to the bottom of whether

or not we are living in the age of robber barons

compared to our more egalitarian European friends, just how exorbitant the gap is

between the rich and the poor in the United States. But mostly we're going to talk about statistical

mirages. We're going to look at the exact same data that media flax and

policy makers look at the standard stuff coming out of the census, and say, hey good news.

You clump this together in a way that makes things look worse than they are.

The organization you're using is presenting an overblown perspective.

And by the end of today's episode, I promise you, you will have a mental tool set

to assess claims of inequality and rates of income distribution that will apply to all similar

conversations for the rest of your life, pending massive governmental overhaul.

Any future conversations that you get into or you hear about involving income

inequality, you will be able to address the underlying mechanics of what that means.

...