Hillary Parties Like It’s 1938 by Alan Reynolds in The Wall Street Journal: Hillary Clinton’s most memorable economic proposal, debuted this summer, is her plan to impose a punishing 43.4% top tax rate on capital gains that are cashed in
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from The Wall Street Journal, The Mumbo-Jumbo of ‘Middle-Class Economics’ by Alan Reynolds excerpts: Amazingly, these same statistics also show there has been no increase for the “bottom” 90% since 1968. Measured in 2013 dollars, average income of the bottom 90%
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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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Alan Reynolds writes Demand-Side Policy Gave Us the Big Economic Fizzle in The Wall Street Journal. Excerpt: Demand-side economists focus on incentives to borrow and spend. Supply-side economists focus on incentives to work, save, invest and launch new businesses. Demand-side
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Alan Reynolds writes The Truth About the One Percent in The National Review Online Excerpt: The table shown here — which uses Piketty and Saez’s data — shows the top 1 percent’s average real income fell by 16.3 percent from 2007 to
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“This means that many of these families have no one working and earning a salary at all. (It’s hard to have a very impressive income if you don’t work.) By contrast, the average high income family has on average two
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Alan Reynolds writes in The Wall Street Journal, Tax Rates, Inequality and the 1% 12/6/11. Excerpt: But here’s a question: Why did the report stop at 2007? The CBO didn’t say, although its report briefly acknowledged—in a footnote—that “high income
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The Grumpy Economist writes How to Lie With Statistics, 4/20/12. John Cochrane takes to task the methods and conclusions of Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty, that are commonly used to justify higher taxes on the wealthy. Saez and Piketty were
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Alan Reynolds writes in The Wall Street Journal, Tax Rates, Inequality and the 1%, 12/6/11. Excerpt: A recent report from the Congressional Budget Office (CB0) says, “The share of income received by the top 1% grew from about 8% in
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From The Atlantic by Derek Thomson, The Most Important Graphs from 2011, 12/21/11 This graph shows how the richest 1% have take a larger share of the economy in the last 35 years: … or does it? This graph does
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I have posted several excerpts from Alan Reynold’s book Income and Wealth in this blog. You can find them by putting his name in the ‘search the archives’ window in the upper right. Income and Wealth was written years ago
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Some policy makers suggest there is a tradeoff between greater equality and greater economic efficiency. But government efforts to tax and transfer discourages productivity for both those that pay the taxes and receive the transfer. If work is taxed and
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The Wall Street Journal Review and Outlook writes Millionaires Go Missing (full access may require paid subscription). The critical point is that there are fewer wealthy now than before the recession. This should not be surprising, but to many it
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One little-noticed effect of an increased minimum wage is that it always increases the percentage of workers who end up earning less than the minimum wage. An employer with an annual income below $500,000 is free to ignore the federal
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I have posted several excerpts from Alan Reynold’s Income and Wealth, a comprehensive look at a more accurate inclusion of factors omitted or distorted by those claiming that middle class incomes have stagnated for 30 years. Excerpts from Rebel Yid
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If the concept of wealth is properly expanded to include human capital, not just homes and stocks, it is clear that total wealth has become far less concentrated and more widely dispersed than it used to be. Percentages of narrowly
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Because wealth is accumulated over decades, it is highly misleading to draw conclusions from a snapshot of who owned what in any particular year. A 2004 Business Week article about wealth said, “The top 10% of families, as measured by
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U.S. journalists, economists, an political figures rarely express indignation about the super-high incomes of anyone except corporate executives. Scarcely anyone professes outrage about Forbes list of the twenty best-paid actors, who average $23 million apiece in 2005. U.S. business magazines
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In a 2004 article in the Nation, … Paul Krugman wrote that “According to estimates by the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez- confirmed by data from the Congressional Budget Office- between 1973 and 2000 the average real income of
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The March 2006 Washington Post editorial that claimed real median wages had fallen for 25 years also concluded that “the rising tide helped only workers at the top [ 10 percent].” In 2003, a New York Times journalist likewise wrote,
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