Posted on 12/18/2006 7:26:22 AM PST by .cnI redruM
Democratic Senator Jim Webb embarrassed the state of Virginia by offering his support to the economic views of the Left Keynesians, in The Wall Street Journal, last November 15. He served these views up in didactic screed, worthy of The Unibomber Manifesto, which he entitled Class Struggle. The normative aspects smacked of a marginal college sophomore who was reading too much Enver Hoxha. It now turns out the factual basis of Webb's polemics is well; not so factual.
In his guest editorial, Jim Webb argues that the top 1% of America's wage earners take home 16% of the national income. This, he claims is double what they received in 1980. Personally, I could care less, as long as my status as a non-member of the top 1% doesn't imply too great a level of personal deprivation on my part. That particular argument is a non-sequitor to me, but unfortunately other people's souls are withered enough with envy to really get upset over how rich liberals like George Soros and Stephen Bing are making out these days.
Thus it is only fitting and condign that Alan Reynolds took to the very same rostrum from which Webb extolled the ideology of Marx to debunk not only the normative content of Webb's disportive polemic; but also it's basis in fact. Reynolds' piece, The Top 1%....of What? debunks Webb's knowledge of economic reality as well as his ideological interpretation of it's meaning.
Reynolds starts his Fisking with a review of The Senator-Elect's data source for his risible 16.1% income share claim.
"The architects of these estimates, Thomas Piketty of École Normale Supérieure in Paris and Emmanuel Saez of the University of California at Berkeley, did not refer to shares of total income but to shares of income reported on individual income tax returns ..... they explicitly exclude Social Security and other transfer payments, which make up a large and growing share of total income: 14.7% of personal income in 2004, up from 9.3% in 1980....personal income in 2004 was $3.3 trillion, or 34.4%, larger than the amount included in the denominator of the Piketty-Saez ratio of top incomes to total incomes."
Reynolds goes far beyond the criticisms of the data Webb relies that I've chosen to highlight. Piketty and Saez play are revealed to have played as many games in interpreting IRS tax returns as some of us play in filling them out. If John Allan Paulos felt like writing a follow up to A Mathematician Reads The Newspaper, he could start debunking the statistical techniques used to message the data for Piketty and Saez.
Reynolds then expands on the studied use of dates by Senator Webb to make his flawed comparison of the wealth distribution in America, then versus now. Reynolds explains how the Tax Reform Act of 1986 encouraged Dastardly Dan, and the rest of those malafactors in the top 1%, to expose a much larger share of their holdings to the IRS for confiscation.
The Tax Reform Act of 1986 created higher tax revenues in three manners. It lowered the actual rate of taxation on extremely high earners. This caused them to no longer benefit from tax shelters of marginal value. Hence, they stopped playing games, once they gained very little from the effort and cost of legally laundering the money through complicated investment structures.
Secondly, this law also caused capital gains to face the same tax rates as regular income. This led to people investing money into the equities market that was previously held in the aforementioned marginal tax shelters.
Finally, the Tax Reform Act of 1986, kicked the props out from under several tax shelter schemes involving speculative real estate investing. This kicked still more money into the category of earned income, thereby making the amount of money the rich raked in far more apparent in 1987 than it was back in 1985.
So Senator Webb stirs the fires of class envy by citing data that is factually wrong, for reasons that are morally reprehensible. People don't walk around hating eachother enough without some demagouge like Jim Webb telling them how unfair the world is. He's right in saying the world is unfair, he is morally bankrupt in claiming that America is unjust. If he intends to complain about the current state of America's economy, he should at least get his facts straight, even if his values appear to be hopelessly warped.
You are correct. She holds The Lifetime Senatorial Dunceness Achievement Award.
Jim Webb, Teddy, Chris Dodd and Joe Biden are only Honorable Mentions in comparison!
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/1754724/posts
He also urinates on the very veterans whose votes propelled him into office.
Subtle.
And totally ignored by the MSM, and never read by the people who need to read it!
Radio show topic? Class envy, false use of "facts" like Kennedy's "36 million people go to bed hungry every night"?
Also, the majority of the state of Virginia has embarrassed itself by electing this fool.
Yes! We need an insurgency. We need a New Direction. We need to turn Jim Webb's one humiliating term as a senator into a quagmire of JimmyCarteresque proportions.
The people who write his scripts are very good at what they do.
Webb should stick to writing something he knows well……pedophilia.
Good analysis of the topic over at NRO by Bruce Bartlett
What else would you expect fools to look like if not fools? Northern Virginia liberals fulfills God's plan of making sheep so they could be sheered.
That is true but to be more specific, these sections of Virginia embarrassed themselves: Charlottesville and environs, Virginia Beach and environs, and Northern Virginia (Arlington and Fairfax Counties, and the cities of Alexandria and Fairfax).
Erase the votes of the liberals infesting those places and Allen would have won big.
They're the ones who especially will have the endure the antics of that clown Webb for the next six years.
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