From The New York Review of Books, Are the Authoritarians Winning? by excerpts: Are contemporary politicians, on either side of the aisle, actually taking action to make the state more just and more efficient? The editors ofThe Economist do find some
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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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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 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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This administration which demonizes the rich, bemoans growing inequality, and holds redistribution as a high value has in their stunning ignorance achieved the opposite results they claim to want.
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Daniel Greenfield writes The Poverty of Inequality in Sultan Knish. Excerpts: The left does hate people who work for a living. The poster child for its childish screeds is Elizabeth Warren, a populist voice of the people who spent three-quarters of a million on
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from Jeff Jacoby in Townhall, Income Gap? Not Many are Obsessed Excerpts: How many shared Obama’s view that the gap between rich and poor is the issue that should concern us most? Four percent. Obsessing over other people’s riches isn’t
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James Pethokoukis writes Obama’s big inequality speech: short on facts and vision in the AEIdeas: excerpt: Here’s the bottom line: America’s pro-market turn some three decades ago reversed what then seemed like unstoppable national decline. (Nations that didn’t make that
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Daniel Greenfield writes in Sultan Knish, Government Money, 3/17/13 Excerpts: How much money has flowed from the Obama Administration to its friends in the private sector in just the last year alone? And how much of that money was used
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Victor Davis Hanson writes America’s Big Fat Advantage in Townhall (online) 4/21/13 Excerpts: The mixture of consumer capitalism and constitutionally protected free speech — and all sorts of races, religions and ethnicities — sometimes means that America can be a
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I have posted several article seeking better information about the myths commonly accepted about the gaps in income and wealth distributions. Some of this analysis in seen here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. Daniel Greenfield in his excellent
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From Phil Gramm and Steve McMillan in their article in the Wall Street Journal, The Real Causes of Income Inequality, 4/6/12. Inequality is a natural result of the expansion of liberty and the development of new technology and new products. Henry
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Occasionally I find an article that raises terrific questions, even if they fall short on the answers. Kurt Anderson writes The Downside of Liberty in The New York Times, 7/3/12. Anderson ponders: Why had the revolution dreamed up in the
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I have posted several times about the perception and the reality of growing income inequality. To summarize several of the those entries: the data can be very misleading depending on which time periods are considered, what is included in income
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Phil Gramm and Steve McMillan note the irony of the call for more “fairness”in their article in the Wall Street Journal, The Real Causes of Income Inequality, 4/6/12. Excerpt: Nowhere is the political debate over income inequality more detached from reality
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The Editors of National Review responds to the President’s call for fairness in Buffetted by Taxes, 4/11/12 Excerpt: The Buffett Rule would function as a secondary alternative-minimum tax, putatively to accomplish what the primary alternative-minimum tax has failed to do: sock
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The Myth of Capitalist Overlords
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,