Income Confusion
Anyone who follows the media has probably heard many times that the rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, and incomes of the population in general are stagnating. Moreover, those who say such things can produce many statistics, including data from the Census Bureau, which seem to indicate that.
On the other hand, income tax data recently released by the Internal Revenue Service seem to show the exact opposite: People in the bottom fifth of income-tax filers in 1996 had their incomes increase by 91 percent by 2005.
The top one percent -- "the rich" who are supposed to be monopolizing the money, according to the left -- saw their incomes decline by a whopping 26 percent.
Meanwhile, the average taxpayers' real income increased by 24 percent between 1996 and 2005.
How can all this be? How can official statistics from different agencies of the same government -- the Census Bureau and the IRS -- lead to such radically different conclusions?
There are wild cards in such data that need to be kept in mind when you hear income statistics thrown around -- especially when they are thrown around by people who are trying to prove something for political purposes. [...]
(bold emphasis mine) Thomas goes on to explain to us just how these statistics are manipulated and taken out of context, and used to support false and misleading conclusions.
The truth is very different from what the MSM is feeding us. With elections coming up, it's more important than ever to have a firm grasp of the FACTS as they really are. Thomas Sowell, as always, explains it clearly and straightens it out for us in short order. A short article, and well worth your time to read.
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