Thursday, February 14, 2013
A Quick Undressing of a Myth Continued
The assertion again - that the United States economy is rigged and that only certain people can benefit from it. The refutation - a) According to census.gov, the mean household income for the bottom quintile of households (not including transfer payments) in 1967 was $8,984. In 2009, the mean (adjusted for inflation) for that same quintile was $11,552, an increase of 25% (no, that's not a lot for 42 years but it fully refutes the notion that the poor are getting poorer).............b) And these numbers are static. They DO NOT figure in to the equation income mobility. As I pointed out in the previous post on this issue, 58% of the people in the bottom quintile in 1996 were out of it by 2005 and a fair number of these folks had actually gone up two quintiles or more.............c) According to the Brookings Institution (hardly a bastion of conservative thinking), those children from the lowest quintile who grew up in the late 60s and early 70s - 82% of them ended up having a higher income than that of their parents and the mean income of this group was double (adjusted for inflation) that of their parents. This plainly shows that, not only is there income mobility within a person's lifetime, there is also a great deal of intergenerational mobility and therefore the system couldn't possibly be "rigged". Dismissed.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
12 comments:
Rigged? Was this in reference to my having said "Thanks to Davis Bacon, "prevailing wage", and other pure corruption, the system is rigged so a large % of road fundings gets funneled into politics", which was really about government corruption, and not about the idea that no-one can get ahead?
Or did someone crawl out of Mom's crawlspace and make a completely reality-free statement again?
I was referring to the progressive and Obama notion that Americans are somehow stranded in their circumstances and that only some government intervention can level the playing field (though, yes, they certainly leveled it for G.E., Goldman Sachs, and Philip Morris) - Economist, Sean Mulholland explains - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbueX92CKPk
The reason that China is building a lot of these windmills and even more of the solar panels is that they're the ones who are sitting on a lot of these rare earth metals/elements that go into the manufacturing of them. The best retaliation from us? Stop buying those crappy things and instead capitalize on OUR resources; oil, natural gas, hydro, etc (and, yes, for a long time that will also include coal).
No problem. Yeah, I'm a gun nut without a gun, too (though, no, I don't put an advertisement in front of my apartment notifying people about it).
And I'm in favor of universal background checks and open to a limit on magazine capacity (certainly not under 10-15 in that would be bad for self-defense or home invasions). Yeah, I'm a real NRAer.
At first I thought that Cuomo Jr. was decent governor (you're referring to him with the 7 rounds limit, right?); tax reform, taking on the teachers union. Now I'm thinking no.
Post a Comment