Sorry that the facts are too complex for you. That article is hardly "as complicated as possible". Its rather simple assuming you understand normal economic ideas and terms.
"Quitile" is a pretty simple concept. If your measuring personal income, people with the top 20% of income are the highest group, people in the top 40% but not in the top 20% are the 2nd quintile, and so forth. The 2nd lowest quintile consists of people in the bottom 40% but not in the bottom 20%. Or to put it another way list people by income, then cut the list in to 5 equal sections. Each section is a quintile.
The first six paragraphs of the article.....more than a third of the article.....discusses how the claim that the income of the poorest people is not rising or rising very little is just not true. Well, duh.........that's not the argument presented by economists nor is it that wages are stagnating nor is that the middle class is shrinking.....all part of a laundry list of claims that your guy creates. Buried in that laundry list is sort of the real issue under contention....that is, that 20% or 5% or 1% of the top are getting the lion's share of the gains in the US economy. I say "sort of" because that's not exactly right either. The real issue is that the income of the upper 1-20% is gaining at a faster rate than the incomes of the lower classes at the expense of the lower classes. So already this guy is on a wrong footing and has managed to muck up the waters. Finally, he claims a new book, Income and Wealth, by Alan Reynolds blows this claim of upper income aggression against the lower classes right out of the water.
How does Reynolds do it? Well Reynolds claim that the following statement by Paul Krugman is absolutely false:
"According to estimates by the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez—confirmed by data from the Congressional Budget Office—between 1973 and 2000 the average real income of the bottom 90 percent of American taxpayers actually fell by 7 percent." (Reynolds, p. 38)"
How does Reynolds know it's false? He claims CBO estimates go back only to 1979, not 1973. Do we know know if the CBO was the source of Krugman's data? We don't. Could there be another source that Krugman was using? Could be....after all, Krugman is a Princeton economist and presumably has the resources of that great university from which to pull. Do we even know that Krugman made that statement? We don't. What we do know for sure is that Krugman put his enormous reputation on the line and lied....at least according to Reynolds.
Let's move on.....Reynolds describes the changes in income per quintile from 1979 to 2000. He claims that these changes prove that the lowest quintiles are not experiencing wage stagnation. Well he did prove that argument but then that was his strawman argument.
However, as far as I know, economists like Krugman were never claiming that issue. Instead what they were saying is that "the richer are getting richer at the expense of the poor". And you know what Tim, your guy proved their argument too and I don't think he even knows it. He did it by breaking out the changes in income from the lowest quintile to the highest quintile for the period from 1970 to 2000. Let me break it out for you:
From 1970 to 2000, the lowest quintile saw an increase of $1100, or 8%.
The next lowest quintile saw an increase of $3900, or 13%.
The middle quintile saw an increase of $5,900, or 15%.
The second highest quintile saw an increase of $12,700, or 25%.
The highest quintile saw an increase of $48,800, or 54%.
It sure looks to me like that highest quintile is kicking the piss out of the lower quintiles but then that's just me.
In any case, Tim, now you see how your guys do it......they don't deal with the real issue. Instead, they come up with an ancillary/strawman issue and disprove that one for their minions...that would be you all. They never bother to get to the real argument because they know that they probably can't disprove it. I think its why they make so many mistakes when they finally do try to do a job.......its because they are so used to double speak, they can't be straight even when its imperative to the success of the job. That's probably why Katrina was/is such a mess. Same with Iraq; same with the budget deficits. In fact, its probably why the Bush administration is one of the worst in US history. |
