Couldn’t Help But Notice (012308)
Of course it doesn’t answer the “What have you done for me lately?” question, but Jonathan Clements at the Wall Street Journal makes a good long-term point:
Moreover, the recent decline comes after five years of healthy gains. In fact, the shares in the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index are still up 69% since the October 2002 market low.
And remember, over the past five years, U.S. small-company shares and foreign stocks have easily outpaced the blue-chip stocks in the S&P 500. The bottom line: Despite the recent carnage, you are likely sitting on handsome profits.
The S&P’s 69% return Clement referred to is 10.5% annualized during the 5-1/4 years involved.
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Six weeks before basketball’s March Madness, Thomas Sowell talks about an economic version of Bracketology:
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.
Why is that a lie, when there are so many statistics that seem to substantiate it?
Let’s start at square one and take it a step at a time.
First of all, there is a fundamental difference between statistical categories and flesh-and-blood human beings.
When there is a growing disparity between one statistical category and another statistical category over time, that does not mean that there is a corresponding growing disparity between flesh-and-blood human beings over time, since human beings move from one statistical category to another.
The statistical categories in this case are income brackets. There is no question that incomes in the top income brackets have risen both absolutely and relative to the bottom income brackets.
The joker is that millions of people move from one income bracket to another.
The even bigger joker is that 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.
When we talk about “the rich” and “the poor” we mean rich and poor human beings, not rich and poor statistical brackets. Yet politicians and the media treat people and statistical categories as if they were the same thing.
….. Among the intelligentsia, it is fashionable to sneer at income mobility as a “Horatio Alger myth” — and, as someone once said, you cannot refute a sneer. But, among people who have not yet abandoned facts for rhetoric, it is worth stopping to consider whether they are being played for fools by politicians and much of the media.
Sowell got his 91% statistic from a Treasury Department’s mobility study released late last year. BizzyBlog coverage of that study is here.
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What viewers saw isn’t what went down when Jonah Goldberg appeared on Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” with Jon Stewart:
It started civilly enough, discussing my new book, “Liberal Fascism.” But things got sufficiently testy that we spent nearly 20 minutes swearing and sparring, and only six minutes aired. The result was “choppy as hell,” Stewart conceded.
Largely left on the cutting-room floor were some important points that might have made my book seem a bit more nuanced. When he railed about conservatives and gay marriage, I pointed out that in my book, I’m sympathetic to it. When he took shots at Republicans, I noted that I criticize the likes of President Bush and Pat Buchanan for being “right-wing progressives.”
Viewers in search of more than disjointed, stuttering cross talk would be disappointed if they caught the whole exchange - it was all like that. Stewart, try as he might, could not understand where I’m coming from.
Remember that the next time someone claims that Stewart plays it down the middle.
I think anyone who appears on these shows should insist that their appearances be aired unedited. Failing that, interviewees should be able to post the unedited versions, or at least transcripts, at their own web sites in self-defense.
By the way, I was in a Borders book store a few days ago. Despite the fact that Goldberg’s book is a best seller (#1 last week, #10 this week at the New York Times; #9 at Amazon as this post was prepared), it was nowhere to be found in the front of the store with other best-sellers, or just-released non-fiction, or any other prominent place. When I asked where the book was, the clerk, as if he had responded to the request several times already, helpfully took me wayyyy back to where the two on-hand copies were — with the regular non-fiction books.
If Goldberg’s publisher has any kind of contractual arrangement with the store promising visible display, it was being broken.
