TTSR “Income Distribution”

Comments on The Thomas Sowell Reader, “Income Distribution," Pages 98-107.

A popular topic of discussion in the news, magazines and Internet that is founded on false pretenses is Income Distribution.  The topic in which ‘Rich’ people are discussed as making ‘X’ amount while the ‘poor’ are making only ‘x’ amount.  Strangely, the news reporters and writers hardly ever define what it is to be categorized as rich or poor (I define this in my earlier writing “A Duty To Die”).

When statistics are brought up, like “The top earning 20% of Americans, those making more than $100,000 each year, received 49.4% of all income generated in the US compared with the 3.4% earned by those below the poverty line ^[1]”, these stats are not talking about living human beings, but households.  The media bases its opinions of income distribution on the average household income that is prone to change and variables that discredit it from the Income Distribution topic. There are too many conditions that make houses an unreliable pointer for judging incomes.  Seldom is one house inhabited by one person.  A house could be the home of two working parents and two working children or more.  A house could be rented out to several people that all lead single lives with school, work, or both.  One cannot base opinions on information that does not apply properly.

A front page New York Times article declared that the “Top 0.1 percent of income earners--- the top one-thousandth” was ‘super rich’ and that they “have even left behind people making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year ^[2]”.  While this report was based on household incomes, a report based on living breathing humans showed that those individuals dubbed as ‘super rich’ had their incomes drop 50 percent between 1995 and 2005 ^[3].  Things are not always as they seem, and even though the statistics were not false, they were misleading.  If this is the not the only topic that is based on misleading information, what other areas are we being fooled into believing deceptive news?

[1] The Global Report, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0FhoratGEk

[2] David Cay Johnston, “Richest Are Leaving Even The Rich Far Behind,” New York Times, June 5, 2005, section 1. Pp. 1 ff.

[3] U.S. Department of the Treasury, “Income Mobility in the U.S. from 1996 to 2005,” November 13, 2007, p. 12.