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Cacique's Recomended Reading List for week of November 12, 2007
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Posted on 11/13/2007 4:07:21 AM PST by gpapa
If you've been listening to Mike Huckabee or John Edwards on the Presidential trail, you may have heard that the U.S. is becoming a nation of rising inequality and shrinking opportunity. We'd refer those campaigns to a new study of income mobility by the Treasury Department that exposes those claims as so much populist hokum.
OK, "hokum" is our word. The study, to be released today, is a careful, detailed piece of research by professional economists that avoids political judgments. But what it does do is show beyond doubt that the U.S. remains a dynamic society marked by rapid and mostly upward income mobility. Much as they always have, Americans on the bottom rungs of the economic ladder continue to climb into the middle and sometimes upper classes in remarkably short periods of time.
The Treasury study examined a huge sample of 96,700 income tax returns from 1996 and 2005 for Americans over the age of 25. The study tracks what happened to these tax filers over this 10-year period. One of the notable, and reassuring, findings is that nearly 58% of filers who were in the poorest income group in 1996 had moved into a higher income category by 2005. Nearly 25% jumped into the middle or upper-middle income groups, and 5.3% made it all the way to the highest quintile.
(Excerpt) Read more at opinionjournal.com ...
The usual suspects deeply saddened.
Hokum, indeed. It is just a thin veneer of justification politicians use to raise taxes.
To me, it is an indelible marker. If somebody talks about growing income inequality, you just know that tax hike is coming. It is an immediate disqualifier, as far as I am concerned.
I will not vote for Huckabee in the primary, because he has shown me that he will raise taxes, not only in his tenure in Arkansas (Wouldn’t it be wonderful if everywhere in the United States was like Arkansas?), but because he has blathered on about income inequality.
The more I read about Huckabee, the more I dislike him.
Wasn't Huckabee the guy that started the famous "tax me more" fund?
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Cacique's Recomended Reading List for week of November 12, 2007
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Just goes to show that there are still a lot of jobs in this country that could be performed more cheaply by the Chinese. We need to get to work on that. Luckily, though, we are borrowing our dollar into oblivion, so even though those workers didn’t get a pay cut, it’s pretty close to the same thing anyway.
My work treats me pretty well. I don’t complain.
I question your use of the word, "still." I think what you mean is (if you had read the article) that there is an ever-expanding number of well-paying jobs being created in the U.S. that can be performed by the Chinese more cheaply, and that we (the U.S.) are suffering increasing difficulty ridding ourselves of them.
(Above all spin from all sides however IMO is, stop building Red China's PLA's war-machine economy; we didn't do it for the Soviets and we "won.")
The key point is that the study shows that income mobility in the U.S. works down as well as up--another sign that opportunity and merit continue to drive American success, not accidents of birth. The "rich" are not the same people over time.
Now that is indeed quintessential. Only demagogues could argue otherwise, but I am reminded of news articles about the children of some rich getting favors; but compared to the truth of the statement above such abuse is virtually nonexistent and even with family help some crash to earth to be replaced by others.
The progress of those in the lower quintiles match the BLS 1982-dollar tables and this probably does mean that those individuals affected by shifts in the job market are now recovering; i.e., as predicted, our economy adjusts. It's good at doing that.
Meanwhile individuals are adversely affected by shifts just as many of us argued and were denounced as "socialists / communists" by some as they cheered the move the Red China. Go figure.
The poorest income quintile in 1996 saw a near doubling of their incomes (90.5%) over the subsequent decade.
These are figures for the x-number of individuals in the study. At the macro level the BLS 1982-dollar tables show a big recovery but not that big. I think it's important to remember that the phrase "jobless recovery" was first used in the years 1992 - 1996. Of course, the dot con (yes, con) boom was in there also for whatever affect it had.
The important factor is that the economy knew that it had only one direction to go, up.
I see spin in the article. Example, the reference to the Huckabee-Edwards-Lou Dobbs spin. The study I believe is micro level (96,700 individuals) and Huckabee-Lou Dobbs are talking macro level. It's so obvious that I might be missing something.
Also, the poorest income quintile in 1996 saw a near doubling of their incomes (90.5%) over the subsequent decade. Those in the highest quintile, on the other hand, saw only modest income gains (10%). Don't get me wrong that is very good but I'll take 10 percent of the highest quintile's income rather than a doubling of a $30,000 annual income any day. :)
It's spin IMO considering that the BLS aggregate income tables show the top quintile's share has increased every year for decades. Nothing wrong with that -- it's just something that IMO should be pointed out. (Critics argue that transfer payments are not considered in the income of the lower quintiles.)
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The key findings of the study included:
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He must have a new book out. Or, maybe, he's still selling the same old nonsense to doomers who want so hard to believe.
The absence of a depression only means that the inevitable depression will be just that much worse. We can only survive 10% annual inflation for so long.
“John Williams (Shadowstats) is on Glenn Beck right now. He says we’re headed for a depression worse than the Great Depression. When it doesn’t happen, will Freepers stop citing his joke of a website? LOL!”
A Depression doesn’t sound as crazy now as it did last November, looks like many “doomsters” (not actully “doomsters”, just people who were smart enough see that what the USA is doing is unsustainable) were right!
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