THE most revealing graph in a recent New Yorkerpost on inequality in America is this one:

The figure and its data come from Janet Gornick, the director of a CUNY research centre on international inequality. The dark-blue lines tell a now-familiar tale: America boasts the highest post-tax-and-transfer income inequality of any highly developed country in the world. The metric at play is a number between 0 and 1 known as the Gini coefficient. In a hypothetical country with a coefficient of 0, everyone has exactly the same income, while a nation with a coefficient of 1.0 is home to one fat cat who takes everything while everyone else earns nil. At 0.42, America’s level of post-tax-and-transfer inequality outranks Israel, Britain and Canada, and dwarfs the figures in Japan and Scandinavia. Ms Gornick’s light-blue lines reveal a less well-reported story. Those lines show pre-tax-and-transfer income inequality, and on that count America doesn’t fare badly in comparison to other OECD countries. At 0.57, America is neck-and-neck with Spain and every Scandinavian nation, and less unequal than Britain, Greece and Ireland. But the American taxation and welfare state clips only 0.15 off of the pre-tax-and-transfer Gini coefficient, while more aggressively egalitarian countries slice off 0.20 (Luxembourg, Norway), 0.24 (Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden) or 0.28 (Ireland). Some have read this graph to indicate that America’s safety net is smaller than commonly thought. But for Ms Gornick, speaking last year, “it’s not just the size of the social-policy system that matters; the way that it’s structured also matters”.

In the US, we tend to rely heavily on programs targeted on the poor, such as TANF, SSI, Food Stamps, and Medicaid. We even means-test most types of government-supported child care. In many European countries, social policy provisions have a more universal structure. So the rich, the middle class, and the poor are in the same programs. Rich and poor are enrolled in the same health insurance systems, they send their children to the same public preschools, they receive the same family allowances—and so on. That’s crucial for building political support for these programs, and that widespread support makes them more stable. Americans, even progressives, often fail to appreciate the importance of universal programs. When people talk about removing the very rich from Social Security—as we hear often in the US—I want to scream. We definitely don’t want to do that, because that would break the universality, and that’s politically risky. I mean, I don’t think that Bill Gates needs a Social Security check, but we need him to be a Social Security recipient.

This is an intriguing argument. In emphasising anti-poverty measures rather than social policies for all, America is more keen to raise the floor than to mind the gap. But pouring less money into low-income health programmes in favour of universal social policies like national health insurance seems to be the recipe for greater equality. With more all-embracing programmes like Social Security, buy-in is broader and the social benefits are more stable.

Some measures along these lines are being advanced at the local level. New York City’s mayor-elect, Bill de Blasio, wants to expand public pre-kindergarten and make it an option for all families. But when such policies are pushed nationally, as when Barack Obama prioritised “pre-school for all” in his last state-of-the-union address, they tend to languish. And, as Mr Gornick points out, those seeking ways to save Medicare and Social Security often advocate reforms like means-testing. That would make them less like entitlements and more like anti-poverty programmes and, if Ms Gornick's data is an indication, move America even further away from the European model that seems to make for less inegalitarian societies.