Teaching “Supply-Side” Social Equity in MPA Programs

Abstract

The issue here examined grows out of the proposition that tax policy is the public policy that has the most pernicious effects on social equity in the United States. We hold that this proposition is so self-evident that it need be examined only tangentially to the main topics of this article: first, why would tax policy be excluded from a core MPA course on social equity, and second, how could the social equity implications of alternative tax structures be most effectively explored in the graduate classroom? The second proposition on which this analysis rests is that the substance of social equity is ultimately operationalized as economic equity. This does not refer simply to the distribution of income that emerges from market transactions, but rather to the distribution of the total range of social goods and other benefits produced by a society.

The social goods and benefits that are the products of collective actions taken to either supplement or correct the distribution that emerges from the private sector are of particular interest here. The term correct leads naturally to the question of what is the correct distribution, and this issue is ultimately a purely political one whose resolution can only be informed by analysis.