【英语语言学习】收入差距多大为大

 RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:

 

Last month, President Obama called income inequality and economic mobility¹, quote, "the defining challenge of our time." Since, as we just heard, President Obama is sure to discuss income inequality this coming week, we wanted to take a closer look at the growing income gap and what that means for economic opportunity.

 

A recent academic report triggered more debate about the issue and NPR's Yuki Noguchi has more.

 

YUKI NOGUCHI, BYLINE²: There seems to be one point that the right and left seem to agree about. That is that this is the land of equal opportunity more than, as President Obama says, equal outcomes. Still, historically, the country's policies have sought to address both. President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty created early childhood education programs and investments in poorer schools. But it also tried to address the income gap by creating social safety net programs like Medicare and food stamps.

 

And Sheldon Danziger says in the decades that followed, that approach worked. Wages rose for everyone. The economy bounced back quickly from brief recessions. Both of those things, he says, are no longer true about the U.S. economy today.

 

SHELDON DANZIGER: What's not going to happen is a return to the golden age when a rising tide lifted all boats.

 

NOGUCHI: Danziger is president of the Russell Sage³ Foundation, a progressive think tank. He argues that the yawning gap in the income distribution - between the top earners and those at the bottom - is becoming self-perpetuating. He says the rich get richer from investments in the financial markets and secure better educations for their children. Minimum wage and middle-income earners, meanwhile, cannot keep pace; making it less likely their children will have the opportunities to move up.

 

DANZIGER: The American dream is less robust⁴ than the Canadian dream.

 

NOGUCHI: Children born in Canada and some European countries do, in fact, have a better shot at working their way out of poverty than American kids. But an academic study published last week found that contrary to popular perception, it has not gotten harder to climb the income ladder in the U.S. in the last two decades.

 

Scott Winship is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a right-leaning think tank. He says that study debunks⁵ some commonly held misconceptions. Just because a handful of people at the top are making much more money, he says, that does not mean there are greater barriers to climbing the economic rungs.

 

SCOTT WINSHIP: There's an intuition among a lot of people that income inequality has had a lot of these problematic effects. But when you get into the research that's been done, it's hard to find a reason to worry.

 

NOGUCHI: Winship says policy should aim to increase access to opportunities to those on the lower rungs of the social ladder. But, he says, narrowing the income gap by taxing the rich more or raising the minimum wage is unlikely to have much of an effect on mobility.

 

Richard Reeves is policy director for the Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institution, and he agrees the inequality gap is driven largely by those at the very, very top of the income scale making even more. And the discrepancies⁶, while staggering, benefit a relative handful of those outliers. Which raises the question: How much does income inequality matter if we're talking about a relative handful of people?

 

RICHARD REEVES: How much does that matter? In a way, I think you're asking the central question of much of current political debate.

 

NOGUCHI: Reeves says: This is where philosophy meets policy. Some say, those who can make money deserve to be richly rewarded.

 

REEVES: On the other hand, you can say that other things happen when people are doing that much better than the rest of society - they pull away. They might be able to avoid tax by complicated tax schemes. They may ensure their own children do much better, which I think is a problem, by opportunity hoarding⁷. They may - if you have a political system that allows people with money to have disproportionate political influence - end up shaping the very policies that result in greater levels of income inequality.

 

NOGUCHI: Reeves says the economy around the world is shifting toward one that heavily favors educated knowledge workers. And that will continue to exacerbate⁸ the problem.

 

REEVES: Policy is running harder and faster just to stand still.

 

NOGUCHI: And that he says is by no means just an American problem.

 

Yuki Noguchi, NPR News, Washington.

1 mobility   

n.可动性，变动性，情感不定

参考例句：

• The difference in regional house prices acts as an obstacle to mobility of labour.不同地区房价的差异阻碍了劳动力的流动。
• Mobility is very important in guerrilla warfare.机动性在游击战中至关重要。

2 byline   

n.署名；v.署名

参考例句：

• His byline was absent as well.他的署名也不见了。
• We wish to thank the author of this article which carries no byline.我们要感谢这篇文章的那位没有署名的作者。

3 sage   

n.圣人，哲人；adj.贤明的，明智的

参考例句：

• I was grateful for the old man's sage advice.我很感激那位老人贤明的忠告。
• The sage is the instructor of a hundred ages.这位哲人是百代之师。

4 robust   

adj.强壮的，强健的，粗野的，需要体力的，浓的

参考例句：

• She is too tall and robust.她个子太高，身体太壮。
• China wants to keep growth robust to reduce poverty and avoid job losses,AP commented.美联社评论道，中国希望保持经济强势增长，以减少贫困和失业状况。

5 debunks   

v.揭穿真相，暴露( debunk的第三人称单数 )

参考例句：

• Historian Michael Beschloss debunks a few myths. 历史学家迈克尔·贝施洛斯破除了几个不实传言。 来自柯林斯例句

6 discrepancies   

n.差异，不符合（之处），不一致（之处）( discrepancy的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• wide discrepancies in prices quoted for the work 这项工作的报价出入很大
• When both versions of the story were collated,major discrepancies were found. 在将这个故事的两个版本对照后，找出了主要的不符之处。 来自《简明英汉词典》

7 hoarding   

n.贮藏；积蓄；临时围墙；囤积v.积蓄并储藏（某物）( hoard的现在分词 )

参考例句：

• After the war, they were shot for hoarding. 战后他们因囤积而被枪决。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• Actually he had two unused ones which he was hoarding up. 其实他还藏了两片没有用呢。 来自英汉文学

8 exacerbate   

v.恶化，增剧，激怒，使加剧

参考例句：

• WMO says a warming climate can exacerbate air pollution.世界气象组织说，气候变暖可能会加剧空气污染。
• In fact efforts will merely exacerbate the current problem.实际上努力只会加剧当前的问题。