Post-Fisc Distributions of Income in 1950, 1961, and 1970

Abstract

Distributions of income after allocating all government taxes and expenditures to households are compared over two decades. Extending prior work back an additional decade and adding extensive sensitivity analyses leave our earlier conclusions unaffected. Specifically, despite efforts towards a more egalitarian distribution and a sizable increase in benefits accruing to the low end of the distribution, aggregate income dispersion in final distributions changed very little between 1950 and 1970.