Thomas Sowell explodes the myth of the widening income gap between the rich and the poor.
Everybody expects politicians to lie, especially during an election year. You can bet the rent money on it.
Among the many lies we can expect to hear this election year, none will be bigger or more often repeated, in the media as well as by politicians, than the lie that there is a widening income gap between the rich and the poor.
…taxpayers whose incomes were in the bottom 20 percent in 1996 had a 91 percent increase in incomes by 2005.
Meanwhile, taxpayers in the top one-hundredth of one percent — “the rich” or “superrich” if you believe politicians and the media — had their incomes drop by 26 percent over those very same years.
Obviously, when millions of people’s incomes nearly double in a decade, many of them move up out of the bottom income bracket. Similarly, when other people who were at the top see their income drop by about one-fourth, many of them drop out of that bracket.