as noted in the OpinionJournal.com –

From an Feb. 4 interview with Thomas Sowell in FrontPageMagazine.com on his new book, “Economic Facts and Fallacies”:

Q: What’s an example of a fallacy from your book?
A: One is the income gap between rich and poor. It’s maddening to me to keep hearing how the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, and so on. The fundamental difference is the difference between talking about abstract statistical categories and talking about flesh-and-blood human beings. Since the book came out, for example, there’s been a study released by the Treasury Department based on income tax returns. There, they are talking about following the same human beings over a span of years, which is wholly different from following income brackets over a span of years, because in all the brackets more than half the people change in the course of a decade. So what happens to a bracket is an abstract question; what happens to the flesh-and-blood human beings is different.

For example, for the flesh-and-blood people who were in the bottom 20 percent of taxpayers in income in 1996, their average increase of income over the next decade was 91 percent — so they almost doubled their incomes. Meanwhile, for the people in the top 1 percent — presumably the rich who are getting richer — their average income declined 26 percent. That’s diametrically the opposite from what we’re hearing from nearly every newspaper and practically every political platform.

But of course it’s also true that if you look at the income tax brackets, the distance of the top bracket from the lowest bracket has increased. One reason is that the very lowest bracket is zero, so it can’t go any lower. So as you pay people more and more money and as the economy grows and skills become more sophisticated, obviously the ratio from the top and the bottom is going to increase.

HKO comments- this is another example of how the media lies with statistics, but it is often as much from ignorance as malice.

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