Exam 21: Income Inequity and Poverty

You are a critic of welfare reforms that impose a time limit on the number of years a person is eligible for welfare benefits.What is the foundation of your critique?

According to utilitarians, the government should continue to redistribute income until everyone in society has exactly the same income.

The invisible hand of the marketplace acts to allocate resources efficiently as well as equitably.

Opponents of legislation that proposes to limit the time a family can receive welfare benefits are most likely to argue that time limits are undesirable because:

Political philosophers agree in their views about the role of government in altering the distribution of income.

A person's earnings depend on:

Because people can borrow and save to smooth out life-cycle changes in income, their standard of living in any year depends more on lifetime income than on that year's income.

Many people have been critical of statistics that are used to characterise income inequality on the grounds that as long as the average income of the poor is increasing, their position relative to the rich should not matter.Evaluate this critique.

As a result of the trade-off between income equality and incentives to work, an optimal redistribution policy:

Present the basic premise of the life cycle theory and discuss why it is used to dispel concerns about an unequal income distribution.

Over the past few years, growth in average income has: