http://www.heritage.org/Research/Taxes/bg1791.cfm
Ran into this great piece of distribution of wealth. Ties nicely into what we have been reading about in class. The spread of wealth is just not evenly distributed.
Nick Bernardo
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I'm not sure that you caught the point of this article in particular, though . . .
Which is fine. This is far from an unbiased source. The Heritage Foundation states its mission as
"to formulate and promote conservative public policies based on the principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom," etc.
http://www.heritage.org/about/
So, their mission is to interpret these numbers to show limit government and preserve individual freedom (i.e. to show how we need less progressive taxation).
Their idea that Medicare should be counted as "non-cash income" is bizarre to me -- but fundamentally, it's besides the point. The analysis of quintiles as households rather than of persons is spot-on, as far as I know, and very relevant. But then there are strange, totally ideological claims like "These families, however, perform a third of all labor in the economy. They contain the best educated and most productive workers, and they provide a disproportionate share of the investment needed to create jobs and spur economic growth. "
I can't see why the authors would have made the claim in the first sentence, or what would justify it. Maybe I just missed that in skimming through. The second sentence just simply assumes, without argument, that "productive" means, for example, something like 'lawyer,' rather than 'factory worker.' The other, similarly unjustified, assumption there is that investment creates jobs and spurs growth, rather than, for example, consumer spending which creates jobs and spurs growth. This assumption -- fundamental to 'trickle-down' economics -- establishes on its own that we should make our tax structure less progressive. In other words, it's a partisan analysis, dressed up so it doesn't look like it.
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