A REVIEW ESSAY

This essay will be a review of a couple of essential points of two essays I had included in my book. I want to retell them here as not only have these previously slipped my mind, but also for the readers who either have not read my book or have had these slipped their minds the same as my mine. First I would like to comment on something that happened this week. As Mark Levin had unflatteringly called him, “Chucky Mucky Schumer” made a direct threat to two members of another branch of government, the United States Supreme Court, if they even dared to vote to couple abortion doctors with having to have privileges at hospitals within 30 miles of their practices. Schumer, paraphrasing the Jewish book of Hosea 8:7 (you did not expect Schumer to quote the New Testament, did you?) said, “I want to tell you, Gorsuch. I want to tell you, Kavanaugh. You have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price. You wont know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions” Schumer told a cheering audience (what kind of demented people were these?) on the steps of the Supreme Court. The moderate Chief Justice, John Roberts, properly rebuked Schumer for threatening members of the Supreme Court by saying: “Statements of this sort from the highest levels of government are not only inappropriate, they are dangerous. All members of the Court will continue to do their job, without fear or favor, from whatever quarter.” In putting out a statement afterwards, a lackey of Schumer lied by stating that Roberts misinterpreted Schumer’s statement, saying Schumer was referring to the Republicans in Congress. That statement was ridiculous on its face. He claimed that Roberts was not being a fair referee, by not calling out President Trump when Trump criticized Supreme Court Justices Ginsberg and Sotomayor. Trump should not have criticized them, but he did not threaten them, he merely said they should recuse themselves from what he thought were conflicts in what they had previous said about a certain case before the Supreme Court. Roberts did criticizing Trump when Trump accused a federal judge of being a Democrat, saying that the Justices are not Democrats or Republicans, but rule according to what’s in the Constitution and law. The ABC network did briefly cover the story and condemned Schumer, but unlike Fox TV which had a panel discussion of it by two conservatives and one Democrat, they referred to an inappropriate (but not threatening) comment by Trump about a federal judge, which was correct, however it was simply a political distraction. ABC did not mention that Roberts had previously condemned Trump for his comment about the federal judge. Now to the other issues. In the essay from my book, The Perils of Denial, I reviewed the story of consultant, Jonathan Gruber, professor at MIT who was a major contributor to the Affordable Care Act (ACA), aka Obama Care. Dr. Gruber was paid $390,000 by the federal government and approx. $1.7 million by various state governments for his consulting work on this law and was paid approximately $6,000,000 over the years by federal and state governments for other consulting work. Gruber made a recorded 19 trips to the White House during the writing of the ACA and met with President Obama on more than one occasion and in one case was one of only 6 people who had a conference in the White House with President Obama. What did Democrats say about him? In 2006 then Senator Obama said he stole ideas from the likes of Austin Goolsby, an unreformed Keynesian economist, and from JOHNATHAN GRUBER. Nancy Pelosi said in a 2009 speech in the House of Representatives that Dr. Gruber, a professor at MIT, was a major contributor to the ACA and Harry Reid said in the Senate that Dr. Gruber was one of the most highly respected economists in the world and contributed mightily to the ACA. In series of infamous videos a naïve, one could say incredibly clueless manner Gruber admitted lies and deception were necessary to get the law passed and repeatedly characterized the American public as being stupid. Because the evidence is so clear-cut in these videos what he said cannot be disputed so this made Dr. Gruber toxic – a pariah to the supporters of the ACA. After this came to light what did the Democrat politicians say? What do you think? Disingenuously President Obama said that Gruber was not a member of the White House staff and so implied that he had little to do with formulating the law and nothing to do with selling it to the public. The House minority leader, Nancy Pelosi said “Gruber, who is he?” “The Democrats in the House wrote the law and he had nothing to do with that.” The Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid said, “Gruber was a minor figure in contributing to the law.” The White House spokesman, Josh Earnest, trivialized the roll Gruber played in formulating the ACA and said he did not contribute in any way to its implantation. What about the Main Stream Media (MSM) of the New York Times, The Washington Post, ABC, CBS, CNN, and NBC? The short answer there was no response except for a short comment by CNN for 4 days after Fox TV ran the story every day. Finally after days of coverage by Fox, talk radio, and the internet, the New York Times, Washington Post, and the TV networks felt compelled to cover the story or lose credibility as news organizations. To quote Hamlet, “Oh shame where is thy blush?” Some of the Democrats who were previously running in the Democrat primary for the presidency and especially current candidate Bernie Sanders keep repeatedly saying that the wealthy in the highest income brackets should pay their fair share of the income taxes. One could make a reasonable argument that the income gap between upper income people and the middle and lower income people should be less. However when one examines who already pays the bulk of income taxes and the movement of people over time from the upper, middle, and lower income brackets, then a different and more true perspective become apparent. This was clearly explained by one of the most respected and knowledge economist, Thomas Sowell. As I have recounted in the essay in my book, Income Distribution in the USA, this is what Dr. Sowell had to say about that: It is indeed true that both the amount of income and proportion of all income received by those in the top 20% bracket have risen over the years, widening the gap between the top and bottom quintiles (from Latin, quintilis – meaning statistically divided into fifths.), however U.S. Treasury Dept. data show that the income of taxpayers who were in the bottom 20% in income in 1996 rose by 91% by 2005. The income of those in the top 5% and top 1% actually declined in that period. Those taxpayers who were initially in the lowest income bracket had their incomes nearly double in a decade that moved them up and out of the bottom quintile. While those in the top 1% had their incomes cut by about ¼ and that may well have dropped many, if not most, of them out of the top 1%. Despite the rise in income of the top 0.1% of taxpayers as a statistical category, both absolutely and relatively to the incomes in other categories, as flesh and blood human beings, those individuals who were in that category initially had their incomes actually fall by a whopping 50% between 1996 and 2005. It is hardly surprising when people whose income is cut in half drop out of the top 0.1%. What happen to the income of the category over time is not the same as what happens to the people who were in that category at any given time. But many of the intellectual elites are ready to seize upon any numbers that seem to fit their vision of an unjust society. It is much the same story with data on the top 400 income earners in the country. As with other sets of data, data on those who were among the top 400 income earners from 1992 to 2000 were not data on the same 400 people throughout the span of time covered. During that time span there were thousands of people in the top 400; which is to say that turnover was high. Fewer than ¼ of all the people in that category during that span of years were in that category more than one year, and fewer than 13% were in that category more than two years. There is an important point, likely deliberately overlooked and certainly unstated by liberals, concerning those income levels. Most people begin their careers at the bottom, earning entry-level salaries. Over time, as they acquire more skills and experience, their rising productivity leads to rising pay, putting them in successively higher income brackets. These are not rare cases, but common patterns among millions of people in the United States and some other countries. More than ¾ of those working Americans whose incomes were in the bottom 20% in 1975 were in the top 40% of income earners at some point by 1991. Only 5% of those who were initially in the bottom quintile were still there in 1991, while 29% of those who were initially in the bottom quintile had risen to the top quintile. Yet, the clueless or duplicitous left has transformed a transient cohort in a given statistical category into an enduring class called “the poor.” Just over half of all Americans earning at or near the minimum wage are from 16 to 24 years of age. And of course these individuals cannot remain from 16 to 24 years of age indefinitely, though this age category can continue indefinitely, providing many liberals with date to fit their preconceptions. In this debate, liberals focus 0n the income brackets instead of actual people moving between these brackets in an attempt to create a “problem” that desperately needs a “solution.” They envision “classes” with “disparities” and “inequities” in income caused by “barriers” created by “society”. The routine rise of millions of people out of the lowest quintile over time makes a mockery of the “barriers” assumed by the liberal elite. A related, but somewhat different, confusion between statistical categories and human beings has led to many claims in the news media and in academia that American incomes have stagnated or grown only slowly over the years. For example, over the entire period from 1967 to 2005, median real household income; that is adjusted for inflation, rose by 31%. For selected periods within that long time span, real household incomes rose even less, and those selected periods have often been cited by liberals to claim that income and living standards have stagnated. Meanwhile, real per capita income rose by 122% over the same time span, from 1967 to 2005. When a more than doubling of real income per person is called “stagnation”, that is one of the many feats of liberal verbal virtuosity. The reason for the large discrepancy between growth rate trends in household income and individual income is straightforward: The number of persons per households was increasing faster than the number of people and concluded: “The main reason for the more rapid rate of household formation is the increased tendency, particularly among unrelated individuals, to maintain their own homes or apartments rather than live with relatives or move into existing households as roomers, lodgers, and so forth.” Increasing individual incomes made this possible. As late as 1970, 20% of American households contained 5 or more people, but by 2007, only 10% did. As evidence that this difference of opinion on income distribution in the USA between conservatives and liberals is ongoing I refer to an article in the September 13, 2012 Dallas Morning News strictly focusing on income brackets over individual incomes (The article was written by a reporter from the New York Times – who could have guessed that?). The article headline was: RICH GOT RICHER. POOR STAYED THE SAME IN 2011. The article went on to say in a sub-headline: “Wider income gap reveals unevenness of recovery, expert says.” It further states: “The income gap between the wealthiest 20% [top quintile] of U.S. households and the rest of the country grew sharply in 2011, the Census Bureau reported, as overwhelming majority of Americans saw no gains from a weak economic recovery in its second year.” “Income from the top fifth of U.S. households rose 1.6% in 2011, driven by even larger increases for the top 5% of households, sais David Johnson, the Census Bureau official who presented the findings. All households in the middle of the scale saw declines, while most at the very bottom stagnated.” And on and on it went in the same vein. The article considered only households, not individuals in the households, nor is there any mention of individuals within the income brackets moving up or down to different brackets. This is all so predictable by the left, yet I am sure there are myriad people who will read it (at least the ones who can read) and not give a moment’s thought to the other view of income distribution as put forth in this essay – with much credit to Dr. Thomas Sowell.