The Sweet Smell of "The Devil's in the Details"

One of the hard-core left's most persistent refrains is that the "poor are getting poorer". We hear it so much in fact that even those of us not necessarily in step with the progressive mindset accept it as gospel. The problem, of course, is that reality isn't always the same as a bromide and, yes, because of this, maybe this, too, is something that we should examine a trifle further....................................................................................................Yes, folks, the earning power of the bottom quintile has in fact been reduced. But the usual indicator of that is the percentage of the adjusted gross income that that group accrues. It says nothing about the size of the overall economy/pie. It's hard for me to think that the poorest of the poor in 1969 was actually better off than the poorest of the poor was in 2009.........................................................................................................Another problem with this statistic is that it generally refers to household income. Yes, folks, this particular indicator HAS gone down but, so, too, has the average size of the household, the number of people in that household who are working, etc.. If you look at strictly the INDIVIDUAL'S income/purchasing power, you're liable to get an entirely different story...................................................................................................The final weakness of this analysis is that it treats the categories as if they were fixed. They're not. If you look at the numbers from the I.R.S., more than half of the people in the bottom quintile of income in 1996 had risen to a higher quintile by 2005 (this, and a fair number people in top quintile moved down). The plain fact, folks, is that most of us start off poor and move up from there. It isn't even close to a static phenomenon, in other words............................................................................................P.S. Here's an empirical counterpart that perhaps fleshes it out a little. A retired person (68 years old, say) decides to sell her home and move to a smaller residence. She makes $250,000 at closing and because of this she shows up in the top 1-2% of income owners. But after that she clearly returns to the middle-class in subsequent years. Another example would be a 22 year-old student who goes from making $15,000 a year as a part-time worker (which would clearly put him in the bottom quintile) to $60,000 as a full-time worker. And there are obviously many more examples that further underscore this dynamism but I think that you should get the drift here, I hope.