Free Republic

We hear a lot of comments about poverty and the “unfair” distribution of income in the US. To examine such things, we need to make a distinction in the type of variables used in economic discussions. There are two fundamental types of economic variables: 1) stocks, and 2) flows. Let's consider the difference between the two. If I ask you how much money you make, and you respond with “$100”, I have no idea what your income is. The reason is because some people make $100 per hour, others make $100 per day, and in come parts of the world,...

One of the planks in the Harris platform was “The rich don't pay their fair share!” Really? In part, this plays on the emotion that most people don't like the rich. On the other hand, by-and-large, most people seem very supportive of the poor. Why is that? Were you hired by a poor person?First, let's look at the “fair share” part. The “rich” (i.e., the top 10% of wage earners making approximately $450,000 and up per year) pay about 72% of total IRS tax collections. The top 1% ($660,00/yr and up) pay 40% of all taxes. The bottom 50% (about...

Zbigniew Brzezinki's indictment of the United States was so harsh—calling America "one of the most socially unjust societies in the world"—that even his own daughter Mika was taken aback, asking her father to explain himself. But that didn't stop Andrea Mitchell from emphatically agreeing with Zbigniew Brzezinki's condemnation of the USA. In the course of doing so, Mitchell called the Tea Party and resistance to ObamaCare "exaggerated forms" of protest, while praising Occupy Wall Street as "a real movement" with "real passion and anger." View the video here.

Nice house there, rich guy. Wouldn't wanna see nuthin' happen to it . . . Robert Reich has actually argued that the rich should welcome redistributing more of their income to prevent an angry American populace from turning on them. Clinton's former Labor Secretary made his astounding assertion on Cenk Uygur's MSNBC show this evening. View video here.

Compared with that 38% of taxes paid by the top 1% of earners, the bottom 50% pay just 2.7% of the taxes collected.

Paul Krugman won the Nobel Prize this week and that tells you all you have to know about how politicized the award has become. American writers no longer win prizes for literature because they are "no longer mainstream," but Paul Krugman -- well, he hates the Bush Administration! He's one of us. There's more to Krugman's fame, though, than just pandering to European aristocrats. In one of the shallowest intellectual gambits of recent decades, Krugman has been the point man for the bizarre thesis that America has become the "land of inequality." For the last five years Krugman has used...

A newspaper’s prime real estate is the space on page one, above the fold. This is where it highlights the most important stories of the day. Usually, the news itself dictates what will occupy a paper’s most important space. So when a paper turns this territory over to a politically charged story that is not time-sensitive, it is sending an important message to its readers about what it wants them to know. Consequently, it is revealing that the Washington Post devoted half the space on its Sept. 20 page one above the fold to an advertisement for John Kerry. It...