February, 2007

Errors about CBO Errors

The Wall Street Journal article I wrote with David Henderson, critiquing the way the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) allocates corporate profits, must have been unclear in some respects because the main points have been misunderstood by Thoma and perhaps also Burtless.
In the National Income accounts, a distinction is made between the capital income of [...]

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Additional Reflections

by Richard Burkhauser

February 26th, 2007

It appears from Mark Thoma’s last posting that he is inching his way into the consensus of Reynolds, Burtless, and Burkhauser, which says that it is hard to find much of an increase in household size adjusted income among the bottom 98 or 99 percent of the United States population since the 1980s using standard [...]

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How Should Changes in Inequality Be Measured and Assessed?

by Mark A. Thoma

February 26th, 2007

I am pleased to see that Alan Reynolds is finally taking a closer look at some of the evidence that works against his claim that inequality has been stagnant in recent decades, though he predictably dismisses it. I will not convince him the evidence is valid, and he most certainly has not convinced me [...]

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Mean vs. Median Income

I opened the discussion by presenting evidence suggesting little change since 1986-88 in the inequality in disposable income or consumption “among the U.S. population as a whole” (as opposed to, say, the 99.99th percentile doing better than the 99th percentile). One unique piece of that evidence — comparing growth of median income by quintile and [...]

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