Ranting to /dev/null

More on Inequality

This article at Slate asserts "The Rich Do Get Richer," and argues that the Bush tax cuts prove that "The rich have figured out how to use the federal government to help them stay that way." Now I'm not sure what I think about the Bush tax cut, though I'm inclined to favor it (heck, it saved me a few hundred on my last tax return, and I'm poor. What's not to like?) But the article, by Daniel Gross, makes reference to this piece by Jane Katz and Katherine Bradbury (Acrobat required), and misconstrues it in the way that most liberals are want to do.

The original essay by Katz and Bradbury indicates that those that inhabit the upper and lower income quintiles were more likely to be in the same place in the 90s than in the previous decade. Gross takes the quote "Compared to 30 years ago, families at the bottom are poorer relative to families at the top and also a bit more stuck there," at the conclusion of the Katz/Bradbury article and uses it to assert that the poor are poorer than they used to be while the rich are only getting richer. In doing so, he has entirely overlooked the word "relative" from the quote in question.

If you examine the data presented by Katz and Bradbury, the only possible conclusion is that the real income level of all 5 quintiles has gone up, but the upper quitiles went up more than the lower ones on both an absolute and relative scale. Inequality has indeed increased. But while the upward trend is smaller and smaller the farther down the income scale you go, the shift is indeed upward for all quintiles. The poor are not getting poorer, they're just not getting richer as fast as the rich. So yes, the income disparity level has gone from 10 to 14, but the truth of the matter is that real income has gone up across the board. Stick that in your income redistribution pipe and smoke it.