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October 19, 2011

'Occupy Wall Street' is wrong - income inequality is a myth

Left-wing think tanks, columnists and bloggers - and, especially the clueless, loony, Occupy Wall Street radicals - keep claiming that the top 1 percent have been exploiting the 99 percent for decades. According to them, the rich have been getting richer at the expense of the middle class and poor.

However, as James Pethokoukis points out at AIE, in reality they're all clueless, the story just doesn't hold together - it's nothing more than a myth. The financial facts don't support it.

1. In a 2009 paper, Northwestern University economist Robert Gordon found the supposed sharp rise in American inequality to be "exaggerated both in magnitude and timing." Here is the conundrum: Family income is supposed to rise right along with productivity. But median real household income - as reported by the Census Bureau - grew just 0.49 percent per year between 1979 and 2007 even as worker productivity grew four times faster at 1.95 percent per year. The wide gap between the two measures, if accurate, would suggest wealthy households rather than middle-class families grabbed most of the income gains from faster productivity.

But Gordon explained that this "compares apples with oranges, and then oranges with bananas." When various statistical quirks are harmonized between the two economic measures, Gordon found middle-class income growth to be much faster and the "conceptually consistent gap between income and productivity growth is only 0.16 percent per year." That's barely one-tenth of the original gap of 1.46 percent. In other words, income gains were shared fairly equally.

2. A pair of studies from 2007 and 2008 conducted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis supports Gordon. Researchers examined why the Census Bureau reported median household income stagnated from 1976 to 2006, growing by only 18 percent. In contrast, data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis showed income per person was up 80 percent. Like Gordon, they found apples-to-oranges issues such as different ways of measuring prices and household size. But in the end, they concluded that "after adjusting the Census data for these three issues, inflation-adjusted median household income for most household types is seen to have increased by 44 percent to 62 percent from 1976 to 2006." In addition, research shows that median hourly wages (including fringe benefits) rose by 28 percent from 1975 to 2005.

3. A 2008 paper by Christian Broda and John Romalis from the University of Chicago documents how traditional measures of inequality ignore how inflation affects the rich and poor differently: "Inflation of the richest 10 percent of American households has been 6 percentage points higher than that of the poorest 10 percent over the period 1994-2005. This means that real inequality in America, if you measure it correctly, has been roughly unchanged." And why is that? China and Wal-Mart. Lower-income families spend a larger share of income than wealthier families on goods whose prices are more directly affected by trade. Higher income folks, by contrast, spend more on services which are less subject to foreign competition.

And the issue of income inequality is not the only thing the left is clueless about; in general, it seems that they are just as uninformed about Wall Street, taxes, and government, as well.

Posted by Hyscience at October 19, 2011 9:53 AM

• 'Occupy Wall Street' is wrong - income inequality is a myth - Oct 19, 2011