I've been writing about this topic for years, and the comments I've made have gotten me in trouble with certain folks. What have I said that is so offensive? Simply that I appreciate it when the Chinese government talks about inequality and says that it will do something about it, which is in direct contrast to the paucity of such rhetoric by U.S. government officials.

The income gap is one of the top problems in China right now, and the government is right to address the issue. You can't grow this fast and reform at the same time without seeing a lot of economic dislocation. From a recent article in The Economist:

[T]hree decades of “get rich quick” advice from party central have left the country divided between a richer coast and still impoverished interior, between upwardly mobile city dwellers and stagnating rural communities. These days, the income disparity between China's richest few and poorest many (peasants, migrant workers, pensioners) would make many a modern capitalist blush.

Now I am not so naive that I think Beijing can or will fix these problems overnight, or even try to do so. I know that a lot of the pronouncements made by government leaders this week at the Party Congress are political lip service and that a lot of policy opportunities have been missed by Beijing over the past few years.

With that in mind, however, let's at least take a look at statements from Hu and Bush on the same topic over the past few days to illustrate my basic point.

Hu Jintao this week at the Party Congress, from Shanghai Daily:

In a keynote speech to the 17th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, the General Secretary of China's Communist Party Hu Jintao said in Beijing today that China will deepen reform of the income distribution system to reverse the growing income disparity in the country.

"We will increase transfer payments, intensify the regulation of incomes through taxation, break business monopolies, create equal opportunities, and overhaul income distribution practices with a view to gradually reversing the growing income disparity," he told more than 2,000 delegates to the congress that opened this morning.

He stressed that equitable income distribution is an important indication of social equity.

Contrast that with this next bit. Responding to new data that shows income inequality in the U.S. is the worst it's been since the 1930s, Bush said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal:

First of all, our society has had income inequality for a long time. Secondly, skills gaps yield income gaps. And what needs to be done about the inequality of income is to make sure people have got good education, starting with young kids. That's why No Child Left Behind is such an important component of making sure that America is competitive in the 21st century.

Bush's remarks do not inspire much confidence that he actually cares about this problem. His statement that income inequality has been around a long time suggests that this is a force of nature that we can not possibly do anything about – this is rather ironic since many argue Bush's economic policies have led to an acceleration of the income gap in the U.S.

Anyway, my point is that at least China's leadership is talking about the problem – at this point they have no choice. In the U.S., the problem is getting worse, yet almost no one (there are a couple of exceptions) is talking about the issue. Although the problem in China is now much worse than it is in the U.S., one wonders what the future will look like in each country and what we will be saying 20 years from now about the policy choices that were made in the past.