Closing the income gap alone would not close the wealth gap

Evidence

However, even if the income gap were to close, the wealth gap would still exist. Black Americans are still black even when we have high incomes, and the tax code doesn’t recognize how our family structures and needs have grown around different circumstances than those of our high-income white counterparts. For example, the tax code does not provide deductions for payments to extended family, and we’ve seen that this practice is not just common but standard among many contemporary black families like those from Atlanta profiled in earlier chapters. — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 485

Another progressive plan, to focus on the income gap, is similarly limited in its scope. Recent research out of the Roosevelt Institute, a progressive think tank, argues that current tax policy is unfair because the benefits “accrue disproportionately to high-income households.” Because most black Americans are not high-income, they say, most are ineligible for the most valuable tax breaks. That’s true, and as we established in our exploration of the job market, racial income disparities absolutely need to be addressed with focus and intention by all employers, for-profit as well as not-for-profit, with a particular focus on the role the federal government can play in helping those efforts. However, even if the income gap were to close, the wealth gap would still exist. Black Americans are still black even when we have high incomes, and the tax code doesn’t recognize how our family structures and needs have grown around different circumstances than those of our high-income white counterparts. For example, the tax code does not provide deductions for payments to extended family, and we’ve seen that this practice is not just common but standard among many contemporary black families like those from Atlanta profiled in earlier chapters. — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 485

Categorization

• QUESTION: The extended-family-payment non-deduction is one of the reader’s four requested provisions — worth nailing down the exact code treatment and a citable figure for its prevalence.
• ADDENDUM: Complements the immodesty/sacrifice moral-panic framework: the tax code encodes one normative family structure (nuclear, individual) as race-neutral when it only matches white arrangements.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth: How the Tax…, 485
• XREF: connects to: Economic growth does not equalize status, and rising wealth only raises entry bars — W. David Marx, Status and Culture: How Our Desire for…, 104