Even More Ammunition For You Class Warfare.... Democrats...

Newspapers, that carry the Democrat's water, typically write headlines that parrot these economic socialist's "Two Americas" talking points and write about income inequality and the decline of the middle class. These spurious claims, rarely analyse the numbers other than cursory reporting in typical 2-dimensional journalistic fashion. These numbers can be deconstructed as I found in these interesting articles and blogs.



So, as we from the chart above, medium family income vs. average family size. What is important here is that even with stagnant incomes, declining family size implies greater income per capita within families. Most importantly, people have chosen over time to live in smaller families, whether its through divorce, never marrying or elderly parents living on their own instead of with children, leading to a decline in average family size from 3.18 to 2.57, a decrease of 18%. During the same period, median family income increased by 31%. This kind of data leads a reasonable person to conclude that standards of living during this period must have risen.

Furthermore, class warfare warriors drone that the poor are getting poorer and the rich are getting richer....

First, we can easily dismiss the notion that the poor are getting poorer. All the Census Bureau tells us is that the share of the pie consumed by the poor has been shrinking (to 3.4% in 2006 from 4.1% in 1970). But the "pie" has grown enormously. This year's real GDP of $14 trillion is three times that of 1970. So the absolute size of the slice received by the bottom 20% has increased to $476 billion from $181 billion. Allowing for population growth shows that the average income of people at the bottom of the income distribution has risen 36%.

The poor are not getting rich, but they are definitely not experiencing declining living standards. Now, I do not argue that even this data is conclusive since data is not provided within income groups and there can be some data that does not support an argument that things aren't as bad as leftists and socialist Democrats argue it is. However, it is clear that if there isn't enough data to support my argument, there isn't enough data to support their conclusions either!