Income Mobility

1. For American households that were in the lowest earnings quintile (bottom 20 percent) in 2001, only 56% of those households remained in that quintile in 2007, and 44 percent had moved to a higher quintile by 2007. Five percent of low-income households in 2001 had moved to one of the top two quintiles in just six years.

2. For those households that were in the highest earnings quintile (top 20 percent) in 2001, 34 percent had moved to a lower quintile by 2007, and 5 percent of those households had moved all the way to the bottom quintile.

3. For those households in the middle earnings quintile (middle 20 percent) in 2001, about one-third moved to a higher quintile by 2007, more than one-fourth moved to a lower quintile, and only 42 percent remained in the same quintile.

4. More than half of the households in the second, third, and fourth quintiles in 2001 moved to a different earnings quintiles by 2007 (see bottom row in chart).

source

Jim Bunning , Welfare, and Atlas

Everyone knows that federal spending is out of control. The feds are spending $1.4 trillion more than what they’re collecting in taxes. And that’s just for this year...

So, Bunning blocks a welfare bill on the ground that the federal government shouldn’t be borrowing any more money. If it can’t afford to be providing the welfare, Bunning said, then it shouldn’t be spending more money.

The statist crowd went ballistic. The attacks were the standard ones whenever anyone objects to any welfare-state scheme: “He’s selfish, self-centered, and greedy. He hates the poor and loves the rich. He’s just grandstanding. The bill is only a small percentage of total spending and so it doesn’t make any difference in the larger scheme of things.”

But the statist reaction to Bunning’s move goes much deeper than that and is a perfect reflection of what the socialistic welfare state has done to the American people. Having been born and raised under the welfare state, American recipients of welfare largess, including those on Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, unemployment, education grants, mortgage guarantees, and bailout and stimulus monies, honestly believe that they are entitled to continue receiving it for as long as they “need” the money...

This is what the welfare state has done to America. It has produced a real war among the American people — between those who produce and own their wealth and those who are trying to get their hands on other people’s money through the force of the state. The 19th-century French legislator Frederic Bastiat put it well when he indicated that under the welfare state, the government becomes a great fiction by which some people try to live at the expense of other people.

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Cartoon: In the Bleachers