Talk politics.

Funny, I was reading only earlier today about how the wealth gap was actually shrinking (http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/the-growing-wealth-gap-fortune-makes-up-the-numbers/), and a few days before that how income inequality has really flatlined. (http://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/2011/10/shocking-trend-in-us-individual-income.html) Ooh, look, and there are charts!

Look, I'm not going to lie and say that the top have all earned their money ethical; there's a lot of collusion with big government, and they should have never been bailed out. But the arguments on wealth gap and income disparity are, well, not exactly as ironclad as their proponents think they are.

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soliloquy76.livejournal.com

Their proponents have graphs, too. So, which group is correct and which one is lying?

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It actually comes down to demographics, (http://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/2011/10/real-story-behind-rising-us-income.html) because "family" and "household" inequality is growing (somewhat), but that's because of how people are creating families and households (generally with only one person working.)

So, partially both sides are right, and partially both are wrong. It's really just data manipulation.

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allhatnocattle.livejournal.com

So what you're saying is forget the data and just go with your gut feelings?

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No, what I'm saying is that both sides of some bit of the picture, but the complete picture, and if you do take that picture into account, it's nowhere near as bad as people think it is.

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Columbia School of Journalism took apart the AEI "study," pretty good, see my above link for further details.

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Pethokoukis’s second bullet point quotes Federal Reserve Board of
Minneapolis papers by Terry Fitzgerald to say that adjusting for things
like declining household sizes, median household income rose 44 percent
to 62 percent between 1976 and 2006 and that median hourly wages rose
roughly 30 percent (when including non-cash benefits like health care).
But Fitzgerald also points out that per capita personal income rose by
80 percent during the same era. What accounts for the difference between
median and mean pay? Fitzgerald:

The remaining difference between the 44 percent to 62
percent increase in median household incomes and the 80 percent increase
in BEA personal income per person appears to be largely attributable to an increase in income inequality.

That’s Fitzgerald from his 2008 paper (http://www.minneapolisfed.org/publications_papers/pub_display.cfm?id=4049#fn1). Pethokoukis misses that quote too.

In other words, median pay is lower than the mean (per capita is an
average) because those at the very top are earning so much more than the
median than those at the bottom are earning less than the median. Or as
the CBO puts it:

(http://www.cbo.gov/doc.cfm?index=12485)

Let’s remember that that cash hourly wages have stagnated or gone
down for folks at the bottom (women earn more than they did, but men
earn less). Here’s a chart from the liberal Economic Policy Institute
showing real hourly earnings for men and women at the 20th percentile of
income:

(http://www.stateofworkingamerica.org/charts/view/164)

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badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com

It's not so much lying as it's contextual. Yeah, there's a lot of wealth concentrated at the top - drill down, and we learn more about why and how it's not as big a deal. Inequality looks like it's expanding, but drill down and we note that the gap isn't quite as wide and that everyone is still doing better.

It's sort of like the health insurance discussion - yeah, 45m people are "without insurance." When you start examining the data, though, you understand why the soundbite isn't all that useful.

(deleted comment)

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soliloquy76.livejournal.com

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ov_ZTBB9szM

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Jonathan Chait of the New Yorker had a recent piece "Inequality and Bullshit." talking about some of the specific ideas conservatives have suggested that disprove there's really that much income inequality. (http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2011/11/inequality_and_bullshit.html?mid=377924&rid=122578258)

James Pethokoukis is a blogger with the American Enterprise Institute who is dedicated to raising doubts about this issue (and he cites that Federal Reserve study you linked in the CATO feature).

Chait observes:

The thing to keep in mind is that Pethokoukis doesn’t directly challenge any of these facts, though he wants his audience to think he does. He cites a bunch of figures that pick away at pieces of the general picture — here is a study showing median income may have grown more than you thought, here’s a report showing family structure helped drive inequality, and so on. His favorite sleight of hand involves citing studies that do not focus on the richest 1 percent pulling away. The gap between the top 1 percent and everybody else is the most dramatic change, and it’s also the hardest to capture, since it involves a small subset of the population. (Indeed, the idea that the income of the top 1 percent is an important economic phenomenon is itself new, and older measures of inequality aren’t really designed to capture it.) So Pethokoukis just cites figure after figure that don’t measure the 1 percent against everybody else.

He is, in a word, bullshitting.

Columbia Journalism Review (http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/aeis_myth_of_equality.php) has a takedown of a “study” from American Enterprise Institute purporting to show that inequality hasn’t increased, after all. What’s striking is the way AEI doesn’t even resort to the usual practice of concocting misleading numbers; it just flat-out lies about what various
other peoples’ research, like Robert Gordon’s work, actually says.

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sophia-sadek.livejournal.com

... with "big" government: they own it. That is not something that will change by making government "smaller." In fact, deregulation only benefits the owners.

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Depends on what rules you get rid of.

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Which specific rules are you thinking of, that would help the poor?

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Any rules that interfere with creating a business are a good start.
http://www.ij.org/about/3554

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Hm, what do you count as interfering? Or 'starting a business'?

I mean, some businesses you usually get licensed for, so people know you have a baseline ability in that area. Just incorporating though, or registering a name, that's all pretty easy.

The stuff I saw on that linked site are... mostly minor it seems. I mean, eyebrow threading (in one state)? Hair braiding? Sure I can see minor changes here and there, but I think overall starting a business in the states is pretty easy.

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Yes, starting it isn't often the problem, but the gov't jumps in as soon as possible. Trying to figure all the regulations you have to follow makes it difficult.
http://www.ij.org/component/content/article/35-economicliberty/3934-atlanta-vending-background
http://www.ij.org/component/content/article/42-liberty/3375-call-the-police-someone-is-opening-a-new-business-in-chicago

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Those two items appear to be isolated incidents... the first is bureaucratic error, and sounds like it should be easy to either fix or work around.

The second sounds like an example of private industry shoving out competition. Atlanta turned the public property over to an outside control:
But two years ago, Atlanta handed over all public-property vending to a single company—the first program of its kind in the country.

I would say neither should be considered a strong example of how most cities and states handle new businesses. I can provide local examples from Portland OR that show the opposite, or I can pinpoint nitpicky laws we are still working on. But we still have a thriving small business community.

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So, you just ignored the fact that it was the Atlanta gov't that removed all competition and instead want to claim that it's private industry doing it. That's...odd.

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I did specify that the issue of turning public to private was the problem; why would I deny who did it? Who else operates public spaces but government usually?

See, the real problem of taking public goods and services and letting private people run it is that someone somewhere is making a choice about who they think is 'better suited' to run it. And maybe they are, but maybe they aren't. And once control goes beyond The Many Public to The Single Private, you have to work that much more just to keep oversight. Or they don't keep watching and things get messed up. Personal position and power should not drive the public interest, but far too often that is all you see from politicians.

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I'm not sure how you conclude that a sidewalk vendor is a public good or service in the first place.

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Not the vendors themselves, but the mutual right to make a living on public property. The one vendor blocked others from participating, when they could not have done so prior.

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No, the gov't prevented the vendors from participating, in preference to one vendor.

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I see what you mean here, but then I must ask you, why do businesses try to own government? The answer is simple: they want to maximize their own profits and hurt their competitors. In this day and age, the best way to do that is not by making a better product, but by changing the law. If we chop away the power that government has accumulated to intervene in the marketplace, aside from very basic powers to make sure that fraud is prohibited and everyone plays honestly, then business will no longer have a reason to invest in government and won't be trying to buy it.

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allhatnocattle.livejournal.com

So how's Occupy Lizzy doing in the Commonwealth?

And what do they do elsewhere? Occupy Lira? Occupy Dinar?

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adrunkencadence.livejournal.com

I'd imagine it'd be "Occupy (insert figurehead's name on the paper currency)"

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underlankers.livejournal.com

I suppose this is one way to hit the establishment where it really hurts and that might also be the most effective thing this movement has actually done.

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