The latest round of disagreement began Sunday with this chart and the accompanying article.
published in the New York Times
Cox and Alm argue:
It’s true that the share of national income going to the richest 20 percent of households rose from 43.6 percent in 1975 to 49.6 percent in 2006, the most recent year for which the Bureau of Labor Statistics has complete data. Meanwhile, families in the lowest fifth saw their piece of the pie fall from 4.3 percent to 3.3 percent.
Income statistics, however, don’t tell the whole story of Americans’ living standards. Looking at a far more direct measure of American families’ economic status — household consumption — indicates that the gap between rich and poor is far less than most assume, and that the abstract, income-based way in which we measure the so-called poverty rate no longer applies to our society.
The top fifth of American households earned an average of $149,963 a year in 2006. As shown in the first accompanying chart, they spent $69,863 on food, clothing, shelter, utilities, transportation, health care and other categories of consumption. The rest of their income went largely to taxes and savings.
The bottom fifth earned just $9,974, but spent nearly twice that — an average of $18,153 a year.
Then the article is mentioned on several blogs of note:
then the critiques begin: The Big Picture
My Thoughts: In a free society should we even care? The focus should be on the individual and economic opportunity that each individual has to become successful. The proper role of government should be to get out of the way and allow the economy to work and function, not to create programs that distort the market.
The groups "rich" and "poor" are bad measures anyway. People move in and out of quintiles all of the time. This is a sign of economic opportunity as well as economic mobility, which is what we should want to occur.
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