A Better Way to Assess the Income Gap

I've learned a lot from Thomas Sowell about economics. Here he provides a better way to assess the income gap between the rich and the poor.

It's maddening to me to keep hearing how the rich are getting richer and the
poor are getting poorer, and so on. The fundamental difference is the difference
between talking about abstract statistical categories and talking about
flesh-and-blood human beings. Since the book came out, for example, there's been
a study released by the Treasury Department based on income tax returns. There,
they are talking about following the same human beings over a span of years,
which is wholly different from following income brackets over a span of years,
because in all the brackets more than half the people change in the course of a
decade. So what happens to a bracket is an abstract question; what happens to
the flesh-and-blood human beings is different.
For example, for the flesh-and-blood people who were in the bottom 20 percent of taxpayers in income in 1996, their average increase of income over the next decade was 91 percent -- so they almost doubled their incomes. Meanwhile, for the people in the top 1 percent -- presumably the rich who are getting richer -- their average income declined 26 percent.

Politics is defined as the competition for limited resources. That's fine. My frustration comes when people manipulate or hide information in order to get results. That's deception. And most charitably, if leaders are simply unaware of factual information on economics, it's underwhelming.

And...from a global perspective, there are over a billion people who would rejoice to be as rich as the American poor.