Re: Rich Getting Richer--NY Times

[briand@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Brian Carnell)]

On Mon, 24 Jun 1996 07:40:21 +0200 (MET DST), Robert Malecki
<malecki@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>Hi Brian,
>
>Are you a Republican? This post was one of the most incredible i,ve seen on
>this list. Perhaps a couple of years in one of America,s ghettoes for you
>would perhaps change your mind about everything in the Wall Street Journal
>is not true..

Those figures (that the lowest 20 percent of wage earners today have
income equal to the median income in 1955) come not from the Wall
Street Journal, which is a very fine newspaper, but from the Census
Bureau.

You Marxists can't stand the fact that the old myth of the rich
getting richer at the expense of the poor simply is not true -- the
only way the rich get richer is if the poor also get richer, as have
done.

Marxists also tend to ignore economic mobility. An unspoken assumption
is that people who are in the poorest 20 percent remain there for
most, if not all of their lives, while the rich remain in the economic
stratosphere. This is not true either, as in the U.S. there is
incredible mobility both ways (a Treasury department study found that
about 80 percent of people who started the 1980s in the poorest 20%
had risen to a higher income quintile by the end of the decade.
Meanwhile about 30 percent of those who started out in the wealthiest
20% dropped to a lower income quintile).

Quite a bit better than what Marxist states achieved in the 20th
century, wouldn't you say?

-----------------------------------------------------------------
Brian Carnell                   http://www.net-link.net/~briand/
briand@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx


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