Jonah Goldberg writes Mr. Piketty’s Big Book of Marxiness in the July issue of Commentary. Excerpt: Homburg, the American Enterprise Institute’s Kevin Hassett, and a team at the Sciences Po in Paris, moreover, argue that the recent widening of the wealth-to-income gap
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from Why Piketty’s Wealth Data Are Worthless by Alan Reynolds in The WSJ: Tax reporting. Tax laws were changed from 1981 to 1997 to require that more capital income of high-income taxpayers be reported on individual returns, while excluding most capital
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Chicago and Black Criminality Many places with less-restrictive gun laws have less gun violence than Chicago, which already sports some of the toughest gun restrictions in the country. The gun-ownership rate in rural areas is higher than in urban areas—a
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from Mark Perry at Carpe Diem, Sorry Krugman, Piketty and Stiglitz: Income inequality for individual Americans has been flat for more than 50 years MP: This is a very important finding that: a) individual income inequality has been flat for more
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Jonah Goldberg writes Mr. Piketty’s Big Book of Marxiness in the July issue of Commentary. Excerpt: A third claim—one can’t call them arguments because they don’t rise to that level—is that the super rich will rig democracy to their advantage. This, too,
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Jonah Goldberg writes Mr. Piketty’s Big Book of Marxiness in the July issue of Commentary. Excerpt: “The consequences for the long-term dynamics of the wealth distribution are potentially terrifying,” Piketty writes. For instance, Piketty fears that whenever the return on capital really
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Jonah Goldberg writes Mr. Piketty’s Big Book of Marxiness in the July issue of Commentary. Excerpt: The most common and strongest complaint is that Piketty’s arrangement of the data paints a false picture of rising inequality in the United States. Harvard’s
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From my article in American Thinker, Everything that Counts: Vast inequalities may harbor the potential for social unrest, but that is muted by social mobility. Oprah and Andre Young (Dr. Dre) may have been born in poverty, but that has
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From Michael Barone at National Review- Equality at the Expense of Prosperity: Economist Tyler Cowen takes issue with another of Piketty’s assumptions, that the rich can earn 4 to 5 percent on their wealth “automatically, with the mere passage of time,
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Martin Feldstein writes in The Wall Street Journal, Piketty’s Numbers Don’t Add Up Excerpts: The second problem with Mr. Piketty’s conclusions about increasing inequality is his use of income-tax returns without recognizing the importance of the changes that have occurred in
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Martin Feldstein writes in The Wall Street Journal, Piketty’s Numbers Don’t Add Up Excerpts: His conclusion about ever-increasing inequality could be correct if people lived forever. But they don’t. Individuals save during their working years and spend most of their
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From Michael Barone at National Review- Equality at the Expense of Prosperity: “There’s a persistent tension,” writes Bloomberg’s Clive Crook, “between the limits of the data [Piketty] presents and the grandiosity of the conclusions he draws.” Like global-warming alarmists, he extrapolates from
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From Michael Barone at National Review- Equality at the Expense of Prosperity: But is his picture of current trends complete? The Manhattan Institute’s Scott Winship points out that relying, as Piketty does, on tax returns for the U.S. statistics means
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From Stephen Moore at Investor’s Business Daily, The Left’s Advice Would Bring A Second Great Depression: One oddity of the current economic debate is that the more Barack Obama’s incompetent income-redistribution policies have failed, the more the left calls for
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Exclusion of Housing from Piketty’s Wealth Data
Jonah Goldberg writes Mr. Piketty’s Big Book of Marxiness in the July issue of Commentary. Excerpt: Homburg, the American Enterprise Institute’s Kevin Hassett, and a team at the Sciences Po in Paris, moreover, argue that the recent widening of the wealth-to-income gap