November 23, 2007
Democrat Mythology On Income Inequality
I am forever hearing liberals complain about “income inequity”, whose dubious statistics the Democrats and the MSM use to press for more and more government interference in the marketplace. When you tell a lefty that a major reason Congress has such a low approval rating is that they haven’t accomplished a thing since the Democrats assumed leadership on the Hill, he or she invariably replies that “they raised the minimum wage”.
Then the more “informed” among them (the ones who read the New York Times), will give you bogus income statistics to show that the average wage has decreased. Some attribute this falsehood to a failure of the Bush tax cuts to help the “little guy”.
My stock reply is that the only thing that might offset the positive effect of the tax cuts is the increase in the minimum wage. Whenever it increases, everybody gets a raise, not just the guy at the bottom of the wage scale. An employer has to pay that increase x 8 x 40 x 52 to all his employees, and that adds up, often to such measures as downsizing to pick up the slack for significant decreases in company net revenues.
Naturally, that falls on deaf ears as liberals believe that a business is responsible for assuming the role of a social services department for employees, even if it loses money in so doing.
But I’m getting a little off track, here.
Where this so-called decline in employee wages is concerned, I am in complete agreement with an article by a columnist I have long considered to be as spot-on as one can be, Thomas Sowell.
Anyone who follows the media has probably heard many times that the rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, and incomes of the population in general are stagnating. Moreover, those who say such things can produce many statistics, including data from the Census Bureau, which seem to indicate that.
On the other hand, income tax data recently released by the Internal Revenue Service seem to show the exact opposite: People in the bottom fifth of income-tax filers in 1996 had their incomes increase by 91 percent by 2005.
The top one percent — “the rich” who are supposed to be monopolizing the money, according to the left — saw their incomes decline by a whopping 26 percent.
Meanwhile, the average taxpayers’ real income increased by 24 percent between 1996 and 2005.
How can all this be? How can official statistics from different agencies of the same government — the Census Bureau and the IRS — lead to such radically different conclusions?
There are wild cards in such data that need to be kept in mind when you hear income statistics thrown around — especially when they are thrown around by people who are trying to prove something for political purposes.
One of these wild cards is that most Americans do not stay in the same income brackets throughout their lives. Millions of people move from one bracket to another in just a few years.
So much for “the rich get richer…”
The column can be read in its entirety (highly recommended, it’s brilliant) over here.
I’ve debated (actually, given the propensity of liberals to screech and try to talk over dissenting opinion, “argued” might be a better word) with subscribers to both liberal doctrine and the MSM over their misbegotten statistics regarding the results of the Bush tax cuts, notably among them millions of jobs that have been created as companies invest surpluses created by their lowered tax bills in expanding their interests and hiring more people.
They say that the average wage has decreased.
I say that “Well, what do you expect? When jobs are created en masse, most of them are entry level. People who had no jobs are suddenly working again, and they are starting at the bottom.”
Most of them will eventually earn promotions and pay raises and, as Thomas Sowell said, they will be followed by others who, while starting off on the lower rungs of the compensation ladder, will progress, as time goes by, into higher income brackets.
Mainstream liberals are, for the most part, either financially comfortable or on food stamps. Neither group has any idea whatsoever as to the other’s realities, though the former believes they are experts on the latter’s realities.
Right.
A liberal who earns two hundred thousand bucks a year, up from fifty G’s right out of college, hasn’t a clue re the life of, say, “the guy who sweeps”, a dishwasher, a retail sales clerk, a cabbie, a homeless person, a bus driver or a welfare mother of three. The valet who parks the liberal’s car at his favorite night club, a busperson in a restaurant, a cashier at a gas station or convenience store, a desk clerk at a hotel, all are ciphers due to the very reality of their being there to serve. Individually, they are outside the equation. All the subjects of liberal attention, with the exception of specific opportunities to play the dreaded “race card” or conservatives ripe for attacking for political ends, are anonymous masses, which allows for a plethora of creative statistics and the interpretations thereof.
Unrelated to the topic at hand but relevant where disinformation by the MSM is concerned, Ann Coulter has a column out on the fearless leader of the liberal propaganda and lies community.
http://hardastarboard.mu.nu/wp-trackback.php?p=761
November 23rd, 2007 at 4:40 pm
[...] Original post by Hard Astarboard [...]
November 23rd, 2007 at 4:57 pm
Wow, things are great:
http://www.freemarketnews.com/WorldNews.asp?nid=51624
informs that the Wall Street big five is rewarding themselves $38 billion in bonuses….for losing $74 billion in stock equity. I’m no econonomist, but surely lucrative rewards for incompetence will have a trickle down effect?
November 24th, 2007 at 12:20 am
The liberals are doomed to fail. The younger the generation, the faster they want to get ahead, and the more money they want to make. I am very optimistic about the future, and I don’t think today’s kids are going to put up with yesterday’s liberals.
November 24th, 2007 at 1:57 am
BB –
I don’t see the current situation on Wall Street as a product of brokerage incompetence, it’s more a product of client-side insanity.
No matter how competent managers are, the bottom line is how much investors are putting into the equation.
The markets have become such a yo-yo of late, based purely on investor fickleness (the fed chairman’s having a hangnail can turn a bull into a bear immediately during the afternoon trading session, then the bull can return with a vengeance first thing the next morning based on an interest adjustment, only to greet the day after that in a steep nosedive because investors have been reminded, as though it were a new development, that gasoline prices are high or that there is a home-buying slump).
The above has driven a lot of investors away from stocks and into other items like gold, which is resultantly significantly over-priced (think of the Hunt silver debacle of nearly thirty years ago). Given that gold has a daily trading limit of $25.00 per troy ounce and taking into consideration business as usual, day-to-day price fluctuations, gold has seen a hell of a lot of gain in a relatively short time. Futures are traded on a round-turn fees/commissions basis, the latter collected after the position has been blown out, so when speculators hold onto positions for extended periods, no money changes hands save for that generated by margin calls, which are not revenues.
If you are the manager of a store that sells merchandise nobody is interested in, even at less than wholsale, and you don’t have the wherewithal to change your inventory, are you to blame because the business is failing?
Much of today’s market uncertainty is generated by politically motivated, chicken little sabotage by the liberal media, whose only goal is to make the Bush economy look like the failure it’s not.
Having said all that, I believe that what a company wishes to compensate its executives is strictly their priority — if the shareholders disapprove of the numbers involved, company directors and upper management will be taken to task for it.
I’m glad that I’m not a big company in the public eye: I am guilty of major over-tipping and paying people who work for me as much as triple the market value of services rendered. If I had shareholders to answer to, I’d be in big trouble.
November 24th, 2007 at 2:15 am
YJM –
I concur.
There will eventually be a conservative backlash.
Even now, while we don’t hear about it from the MSM (for obvious reasons), there are conservative organizations and newspapers springing up on college campuses around the country, resisting their liberal environments, many prevailing against incessant attacks by faculties and liberal campus orgs alike.
But sticking to their guns.
November 24th, 2007 at 7:47 pm
Y’know, the part about how Congress has a low approval rating because they haven’t done anything is suspect. Most people worth talking to would see a do-nothing Congress as a Good Thing, since Congress is controlled (for the moment) by Democrats, and any time they “do something”, it tends to manifest itself as some form of “take your money and run your life.”
I think it’s more likely that nobody likes them because of their insistence on nothing less than defeat in the war on Islamo-fascism and their persistent delusion that this is 1974 again and George W. Bush is Richard Nixon.
November 24th, 2007 at 7:59 pm
I used to work with a man who was a dead dog Democrat. I pointed out to him how many billionaires were Democrats.
His response.
“They may be rich but they’re Democrats because they care about us.”
How gullible.
November 25th, 2007 at 8:38 am
Uncle Pavian –
Good point, the less they do the better during their two year majority.
The Reid and Pelosi posses have made 58 attempts in 10 months to tie “cut & run” agendas into other bills. That averages out to 1 point something attempts per week.
Shoprat –
Given that they have nothing proactive to actually contribute, the Democrats depend entirely on their fraudulent “The Democrats care about you, The Republicans don’t” message.
The people who vote for them time and again are beyond gullible, they are pathetic: No matter how many times the Democrats prove that all they are good for anymore is empty rhetoric, these same idiots keep supporting them, over and over.
November 26th, 2007 at 2:58 pm
fantastic post my friend!..The libs will never see the truth of this..and
u like Sowell..are pure genius!..grinz:)
November 26th, 2007 at 4:40 pm
Angel –
Thanx!
November 27th, 2007 at 1:49 pm
Wait till a liberal is in the White house again, their own party wont like being taxed to death either.
Then again we cant let that happen.
November 27th, 2007 at 6:31 pm
Marie –
I think the Democrats are campaigning against themselves. All these socialist offerings will probably bomb among a large chunk of their moderates and more conservative middle class voters, and their lackluster performance as the Congressional majority pretty much speaks for itself.
As for their Presidential candidates, well… I’m pretty sure we’ll get another Republican in the White House after the 2008 election smoke clears.
Even though I’m a Tom Tancredo man down to my socks, being realistic, I expect that Giuliani will face and beat Hillary in the general election.
Of course, given the Mad Tea Party that U.S. politics has become, I’m keeping my fingers crossed….
November 30th, 2007 at 2:11 pm
See my Obama post, which relates:
http://americanpowerblog.blogspot.com/2007/11/barack-obama-and-politics-of-race.html
November 30th, 2007 at 11:26 pm
Donald –
That is a great post, and as such I am pasting my comment thereupon here as well as at your place:
Excellent post, Donald, well thought out.
I think that Obama’s failure to work the “race card” into his politics works against him among the far left base that presently controls the Democratic Party — conservative racial policies do not appeal to them because they don’t believe that any black politician or other black public figure who does not embrace militant racial dogmas fits into the template they employ for gauging the value of blacks to their ongoing agendas.
To the left, a “genuine” black person is one who subscribes to the Sharpton/Jackson school of thought.
Adding Obama’s profound naivety on global politics, the tragedy-bound economic POV he shares with his portside colleagues and his lack of tangible political management experience, I don’t see him as standing any real chance of prefixing his home address with 1600 after November 2008.