Does the widening gap between rich and poor really matter?
Some say no, because the poor can get richer. Prebble says the New Zealand poverty studies “only looked at snapshots in time of how many people were in various income bands”. Studies in the United States, on the other hand, “found that over time, a person starting in the bottom quintile was more likely to end up in the top quintile, than someone starting in the top quintile was to stay there. “What really matters is not whether you are rich or poor, but whether you are able to improve your lot in life by your own efforts. What is required for this is a free and open society where people are not held down by welfarism and high effective tax rates.” Business Roundtable executive director Roger Kerr makes a similar point. “The poor will always be with us, especially if we measure poverty on a relative scale, but the same people are not always poor, he said in a June speech about the Statistics NZ report. “People’s incomes change markedly over time as they move between education, part or f
