Re: The telling detail

In article
<0d00a136-65c7-4d51-b80c-4ccab420399d@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Cryptoengineer <petertrei@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Your source, sadly, has the top 5% as its highest bracket. That's
hardly the 'uber-rich'. I wish the data covered the top 1%, or better,
the top 0.1%.

Agreed. I gather that isn't available yet, although the author of the
piece I linked to makes a comment that suggests he thinks he has some
information on it.

Looking at the article again, I notice that the author is someone I
actually spoke to earlier today! I expect I'll see him again, since we
are both at the moment at GMU, and I'll ask him about it.

I was, as I noted more than
once, making extrapolations from (sourced) trends going back decades,

I have no objection to your pointing out the trend, which so far as I
can tell is real and interesting. But when you make an assertion about a
particular time period, which seemed to me the only plausible
interpretation of your reference to the present economic difficulties,
you need data on that time period to support it.

The point, after all, of what you wrote, was that even when other people
were doing badly the rich kept getting richer. You cannot support that
claim by data on a time when other people were not doing badly--which it
seems to me is what you were claiming to do.

along with empirical observations of any reasonable observer in the
past decade.

I don't see how casual empiricism can tell you whether the top 1% are
getting richer in a particular period, and given how politically loaded
the discussion is, I would heavily discount unsupported claims by any
"reasonable observer."

Wouldn't you?

The rhetoric from the administration and its supporters has strongly
implied that the rich pay a smaller fraction of their income as federal
taxes than the population as a whole, which is the reverse of the actual
situation, so far as one can tell from the available data. Under
pressure that can get scaled back to "don't pay their fair share," which
is a completely empty claim, absent any basis for deciding what whose
fair share is.

I'm hardly alone:

True.

http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2011/0808/focus-credit-meltdown-unemployment-brig
-rich-richer.html
(not exactly a Wobbly rag :-)

Its information is about the world not about America.

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2011/jul/06/it-true-rich-are-g
etting-richer/
(claims to be a neutral source, evaluates several claims on both
sides.

When I pasted in the URL, after unwrapping, and tried to go there I got
an error message. I looked at the site but wasn't able to find that
particular page.

--
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/
http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/
_Salamander_: http://tinyurl.com/6957y7e
_How to Milk an Almond,..._ http://tinyurl.com/63xg8gx
.

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