If all the income of a population were held by a single individual and the rest had no income at all, the Gini coefficient would be If, on the other hand, income were perfectly equal, the coefficient would be 0. The Gini coefficient of the United States is relatively high for a market economy: according to the World Bank, it is 41.5 based on 2019 data, while Canada's is 33.3, Japan's is 32.9 or Germany's is 31.7.
Inequality can be interpreted as the entire journey that a person can make from the beginning of his or her career to the end, since the lowest income brackets generally correspond to early ages, and the last ones to advanced ages.
More progressivism, more inequality
In any case, there is a certain tendency for the more progressive states to be those with greater inequality, while the more conservative states have more moderate inequality.
This is the conclusion reached by an analysis conducted by Daily Wire based on data from the Census Bureau. Thus, New York, Connecticut, and California, which have had progressive policies for years or decades, are the states with the greatest inequality. And on the opposite side, we find North and South Dakota, Indiana, and Utah.
Moreover, if we measure on the one hand the Gini coefficient, and on the other hand the percentage of each state's legislatures that correspond to one party or the other, we observe a correlation between the two: the higher the percentage of Republican legislators (a more conservative state), the lower the inequality, and the opposite occurs when the percentage of state legislators is higher for the Democrats.
Poverty
The same is true for poverty. With the Census Bureau's new poverty standard, it is noted that "Conservative states have less poverty than blue states. The four states with the lowest poverty are also the four most conservative states in the country. And California, the second most liberal state, has by far the highest poverty rate, at over 18%."
According to economist David Gordon of the Mises Institute,
This shows that all the things they complain about [democrats] come from Democratic policies. For example, when they complain about poor outcomes for blacks, that happens mostly in areas where they have ruled for generations, with catastrophic effects.
