Quote:
Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
Sure -- "smear" in the sense of linking to lengthy, detailed critiques of his work from a respected conservative economist and a lefty journalist. (To which your only response has been to post an op-ed the guy wrote in the WSJ.) With a "smear" like that, I don't have to resort to more conventional name-calling.
That is a far more interesting conversation than where you started today. The question is, why did you have to pretend that the gap between rich and poor isn't widening if you really think it isn't a bad thing.
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1) If a poor person on average makes a hundred dollars a year and a rich person makes a thousand, and then ten years later a poor person makes two hundred and the rich person makes two thousand, do you consider the gap widening?
On a purely dollar term the gap is widening. That is where the statistics games begins that Sebby is talking about.
2) As long as the poor are getting richer, who cares what the rich are making. Isn't that just the politics of envy. In any system where the poor get richer the rich get even richer. Over the long term there has never been a successful system where the poor get richer and the rich get poorer or even stay the same. When you equalize incomes you just equalize the misery.
The focus should be on how the bottom two quintiles are faring.
