Media Myth Debunked: Income Inequality Is Actually Plummeting
Since the first Occupy Wall Street protest, you haven't been able to swing a dead cat in this country without hitting an Obama-loving media member carping and whining about income inequality.
Yet according to this chart created by the nation's largest federation of trade unions the AFL-CIO, the difference between average CEO and average worker pay has been plummeting since the year 2000:
As you can see, the real explosion in income inequality happened in the '90s as stock prices went through the rough during the tech bubble.
Yet from 2000 through 2009, this disparity actually declined by 50 percent.
To assist in furthering the point, NewsBusters member Gary Hall has added to the AFL-CIO's chart:
In reality, the real creator of income inequality in recent decades was - wait for it!- Bill "I Feel Your Pain" Clinton.
You remember the media complaining in 2000 when the average CEO was making 525 times the average worker?
No, I don't either.
But the best is still to come because the president that radically narrowed this disparity in pay was - wait for it again! - George W. Bush!
Despite this narrowing, Bush is depicted as a pawn of the wealthy and enemy of the common man.
With this data from the AFL-CIO, maybe he should be the Occupy movement and its media minions' hero rather than their goat.
Additionally, since this income disparity exploded under Clinton, maybe his fans in the press should reconsider their love for the economy of the '90s.
Unless, of course, income inequality really doesn't matter if it can't advance their liberal agenda.
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Comments
⇒ The roof, not the rough
Submitted by Cool Arrow on Sun, 02/19/2012 - 7:18pm.
But since I was watching golf, I understood the concept perfectly.
the LSM will be so embarassed
Submitted by TruthMonger on Sun, 02/19/2012 - 7:25pm.
the LSM will be so embarassed when they report this
Congratulations Jimmy Carter!
⇒ Deserves a chuckle, TM
Submitted by Cool Arrow on Sun, 02/19/2012 - 7:43pm.
When and why do you think they will report it?
That's funny. I don't care who y'are
Income inequality - allow me to pile it on . .
Submitted by Gary Hall on Sun, 02/19/2012 - 7:46pm.
it's a given that the name of Bill Clinton - his era - often comes up when the MSM is talking about that titillating era of peace [LOL] and prosperity, but when they're all out there blasting the the theme of the 1% making it big during certain period of time, Bill Clinton's name is nowhere to be found.
Here's how it gets misused (this claim has been used often by the Obama administration, the Democrats and our national MSM, in their effort to blame this issue of theirs all on Bush and the Republicans.
Oct. 23rd.. 2008 Senator/Candidate Joe Biden being interviewed by Barbara West of the Orlando, FL WFTV station, my bold:
Biden: “They have devastated the middle class. We, for the first time since the late ‘20s first time since the 1920's - 1 % of the American people make over 21% of all the income in America. That wasn’t the way before George Bush became president.."
Oh boy, that's a sales job. OK, he's lying through his teeth and the national MSM made the story their own.
In 2000, this data point was 20.81%. Can we round that to 21%, or not?
The income share of the top 1% of income earners had soared from 13.7% of all income earned, in 1993, to 21% in 2000 - a level not seen since the great depression.
Enter Bush.
Now (2009 is the last data available) it stands at 16.9%
Why don't they love President Bush?
(;~/ gary
It is sometimes difficult to
Submitted by stratman on Sun, 02/19/2012 - 11:00pm.
It is sometimes difficult to tell if Biden is lying or just galactically stupid. Bite-Me is, after all, a walking Macaca Moment.
Both
Submitted by Schofield Kid on Mon, 02/20/2012 - 6:54pm.
A little of both I would imagine. After all he's a lifelong politician who once stole a british MP's speech about his life experiences and made it his own. He's also lied on numerous occasions about a drunk driver having killed his wife and son. I guess that he figures that to be more sympathetic than simply it was a car accident.
"hey everybody, stand up for Chuck!"
Yes, the "Bush policies",
Submitted by robert108 on Sun, 02/19/2012 - 8:36pm.
Yes, the "Bush policies", which the far left loves to revile and blame for all of obama's failures, actually reduced income inequality. Of course, income inequality(based on achievement) is the driving force behind the success of the American free enterprise system.
In our
Submitted by bobsmom on Sun, 02/19/2012 - 9:10pm.
new normal, where skilled trades that used to command big bucks, are now competing with everyone else for a $12.00 an hour job, I guess you could say income inequality is plummeting. However, it's not because things are getting better, it's because they are getting worse. Pay is decreasing for many jobs, and we're accepting it to keep our jobs. That's not equality, it's redistribution. Take from those who are skilled/educated and diminish their value and elevate others to "even things out". That's what I'm seeing.
great !!
Submitted by angelann1 on Sun, 02/19/2012 - 10:13pm.
It is wonderful when you can use the enemies' own research !!!
Extremely distorted chart
Submitted by CO2Maker on Sun, 02/19/2012 - 10:47pm.
The X-axis scale is not consistent. It changes in 2000, at the end of Clinton's term, and that makes the angle of the slopes of the line dramatically different and misleading.
Clinton was president for 8 years, and so was Dubya, yet the width of the scale from 2000 to 2008 (Bush' 43's term) is almost four times wider than the width of the scale from 1992 to 2000 (Clinton's term). The narrower span for Clinton makes the angle of the line during the entire Clinton administration (when the disparity quadrupled) much steeper than the line from throughout the Bush years (when it fell by half).
Must have been made by a union worker.
Notice how they attempt to lie with statistics...
Submitted by Jeff Sisyphus on Sun, 02/19/2012 - 10:56pm.
Even when they show you a graph? Note data points jump ten years, then ten, then five, then one. The graph is meaningless until the X axis is consistent. If you sketch it out the right way, your point is even more dramatically proven, and shows the amazingly steep incline in the 90's even better!
(ps: sorry about the old tag line below...haven't contributed in a while!)
Everyone is equally unemployed
Submitted by povertypimpin on Sun, 02/19/2012 - 11:05pm.
yaaaah!
Why is income equality an
Submitted by big.league.slider on Sun, 02/19/2012 - 11:10pm.
Why is income equality an issue, while income tax liability equality is not?
Ding ding ding...
Submitted by ontheright on Mon, 02/20/2012 - 2:01pm.
...Ladies and Gentlemen - we have a winner!
I've always wondered, if someone doesn't have skin in the game (read: pay taxes, as in income taxes), why are they allowed to vote?
Although...I guess it really doesn't matter anymore since, "The people who cast the votes don't decide an election, the people who count the votes do." - Joseph Stalin
AND
We're fast approaching a point of no return because logic, and Benjamin Franklin tells us, “When the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.”
what about this
Submitted by exboyracer on Mon, 02/20/2012 - 4:03pm.
You can't pay taxes unless you pay at least 25% taxes capitol gains included and not carried interest.
Meaningless rubbish.
Submitted by drsamherman on Sun, 02/19/2012 - 11:10pm.
No identification of any axis on a chart means one or more of three things; a) it is a pile of bullcrap; b) the books were cooked; c) the graphs use the fallacy of slope or the fallacy of magnitude to falsely imply a difference.
That graph is virtually meaningless...
Submitted by Jer on Mon, 02/20/2012 - 1:31am.
no underlying data, methodology, or definition of terms.
There have been been numerous studies demonstrating the growth in income disparity over the past three decades [such as the CBO Report --Summary on p. 10--released in October 2011 excerpted below]:
Summary Figure 1.
Growth in Real After-Tax Income from 1979 to 2007
(Percent)
Source: Congressional Budget Office.
Note: For information on income definitions, the ranking of households, the allocation of taxes, and the construction of inequality indexes,
see “Notes and Definitions” at the beginning of this study.
before government transfers and taxes) in favor of higher income
households; that is, such households’ share of
market income was greater in 2007 than in 1979. Specifically,
over that period, the highest income quintile’s share
of market income increased from 50 percent to 60 percent
(see Summary Figure 2). The share of market
income for every other quintile declined. (Each quintile
contains one-fifth of the population, ranked by adjusted
household income.) In fact, the distribution of market
income became more unequal almost continuously
between 1979 and 2007 except during the recessions in
1990–1991 and 2001. [My emphasis in bold]
Statistics can be manipulated to support a favored premise and the same data with added variables can produce reasonable yet contradictory interpretations. Paul Ryan, for example, submitted a seventeen page rebuttal to the CBO findings and introduced several factors which could affect the conclusions of the Report, or at the very least broaden the context in which any analysis should be conducted.
However, the evidence of wealth being increasingly concentrated within the narrowest percentile is overwhelming. Indeed, it was a palpable trend during the Clinton presidency, but I have yet to see a shred of proof that the evidence of same was buried by a sympathetic media.
Jer
You never---
Submitted by matthewdean on Mon, 02/20/2012 - 1:42am.
did; never do; and never will if it paints your side in less than glowing terms.
MD
Well you are more than welcome to link
Submitted by Jer on Mon, 02/20/2012 - 3:08am.
such evidence.
But you won't, because you never have and never will.
Jer
Read my tag line, Jer, ---
Submitted by matthewdean on Mon, 02/20/2012 - 6:18pm.
and see if you can get it through to your scholarly, lawyer trained brain, just how asinine your stupid assed comments along this line are.
MD
Well gee wiz Uncle Jer
Submitted by Denny Crane on Mon, 02/20/2012 - 7:25am.
Indeed, it was a palpable trend during the Clinton presidency, but I have yet to see a shred of proof that the evidence of same was buried by a sympathetic media.
That's because NB wasn't created yet! But I bet if you research the archives at MRC, you could find it.
We Are The 53%
It's not so much that the story was buried, Denny...
Submitted by Jer on Mon, 02/20/2012 - 8:10am.
but rather there was no story to report due to diminished public concern about the disparity. And a likely reason for that lack of concern has been addressed in the following excerpt from Striking It Richer:
The 1993–2008 period encompasses, however, a dramatic shift in how
the bottom 99 percent of the income distribution fared. Table 1 next
distinguishes between four sub-periods: (1) the 1993–2000 expansion of the
Clinton administrations, (2) the 2000-2002 recession, (3) the 2002-2007
expansion of the Bush administrations, and (4) 2007-2008, the first year of
the Great recession. During both expansions, the incomes of the top 1
percent grew extremely quickly at an annual rate over 10.3 and 10.1 percent
respectively. However, while the bottom 99 percent of incomes grew at a solid
pace of 2.7 percent per year from 1993–2000, these incomes grew only 1.3
percent per year from 2002–2007. As a result, in the economic expansion of
2002-2007, the top 1 percent captured two thirds of income growth. Those
results may help explain the disconnect between the economic experiences
of the public and the solid macroeconomic growth posted by the U.S.
economy from 2002 to 2007. Those results may also help explain why the
dramatic growth in top incomes during the Clinton administration did not
generate much public outcry while there has been an extraordinary level of
attention to top incomes in the press and in the public debate since 2005.
Moreover, top income tax rates went up in 1993 during the Clinton
administration (and hence a larger share of the gains made by top incomes
was redistributed) while top income tax rates went down in 2001 during the
Bush administration.
In other words, all sectors were doing better--significantly and consistently--under Clinton, while the bottom 99% were experiencing either negative or very modest income gains under Bush. It's little wonder then that such factors could and would breed public discontent and commensurate media coverage.
Jer
Really...?
Submitted by ontheright on Mon, 02/20/2012 - 1:27pm.
"...there was no story to report due to diminished public concern about the disparity."
Hmmm. So, using your logic, news outlets (at least on the liberal side of the spectrum anyway) only report "stories" (economic news) that is filtered through the prism of "diminished public concern". Wow, I didn't realize that's how the Pravda Elite (LSMedia) determined what was fit to report...I learn somthing new every day.
Let's take this a step further - one could logically conclude that it is the liberal news outlets themselves who determine what IS news and therefore merits reporting; not the actual news item(s) itself. Sound about right to you? Thought so.
since when does the media
Submitted by TruthMonger on Mon, 02/20/2012 - 1:39pm.
since when does the media care about public interest - where did this sudden interest in contraception come from...?
Congratulations Jimmy Carter!
Thank you...
Submitted by ontheright on Mon, 02/20/2012 - 1:43pm.
...for driving my point home for me.
The Pravda press of the left is all about Govt. control - no way shape or form do they care about "public interest" - if it doesn't fit the narrative, it's not "fit to print".
Pretty much...ontheright
Submitted by Jer on Wed, 02/22/2012 - 12:18am.
I will give you--and others--this, however: My argument about the lack of a "story to report" on income disparity during the 90's is weakened by quantifying it with the word "no". Absolute and unqualified terms like that are bound to be troublesome for the claimant unless there is reliable, statistically corroborative evidence readily at hand backing up the contention.
My guess is there were some articles during the Clinton presidency--published in the "liberal" media--concerning the increasing trend of disproportionate wealth concentration in this country. How many articles, and to what extent--if any at all--they may have been critical of Clinton's policies regarding the phenomenon, I have no idea. But I do know that liberal publications such as the NYT--which launched, along with the LA Times, the Whitewater investigative saga--were not particularly deferential to Clinton. As I've pointed out on prior occasions, Howell Raines, the editor of the NYT opinion pages for much of that decade, had a personal animus against Clinton which a review of the editorials readily reveals. That's not to say the Times generally disagreed with his policies--or with liberal positions on ideological issues--but it was anything but a dependable booster and reliable ally of Clinton, nor was it inclined to protect him or cover for him. And the notion that it would have spiked stories about income inequality so as not to embarrass his administration is, frankly, preposterous.
As such, I believe the explanation advanced in the excerpt I quoted which suggested a lack of public outcry (due to widespread satisfaction with the economy) and thus accounted for less media attention does have merit. That said, the questions you raise either explicitly or by implication about whether public opinion leads the media or vice versa, and the reportorial responsibility of the media regardless of the public mood, once those questions are peeled away from your right-wing buzzword rhetoric and your snide straw man assumptions, are also good ones.
Jer
⇒ I did notice
Submitted by Cool Arrow on Wed, 02/22/2012 - 12:22am.
I did notice the homeless completely disappeared from the National discourse the moment Bill Clinton took office.
OK, Rush noticed it too, so in keeping with your admonition to eschew (gesundheit) absolutes, did anybody else notice?
And that would be due in large part, Cool...
Submitted by Jer on Wed, 02/22/2012 - 12:59am.
to the fact the national discourse had turned to Whitewater, special prosecutors, bimbo eruptions, draft dodging, gays in the military, broken promises on taxes, HillaryCare and Clinton radicalism, Travel Office scandal, Vince Foster's murder by the Clintons, etc. The homeless got lost in the shuffle.
Did you notice that as well?
Jer
⇒ Wow, Jer
Submitted by Cool Arrow on Wed, 02/22/2012 - 1:08am.
I didn't realize all that happened in the first 100 days of his Presidency.
Guess I'd better stipulate to your keen sense of chronological meticulousness, huh?
Well, Cool...
Submitted by Jer on Wed, 02/22/2012 - 2:14am.
I didn't know you were establishing a time frame with strictly defined limits. Touching on several of the more prominent, controversial and widely reported upon matters which arose during the campaign and/or dominated Clinton's first term in office was, in my view, an appropriate counter to your argument that an obeisant press was cutting Clinton some slack by 86ing the homeless story.
Jer
⇒ OK, Jer
Submitted by Cool Arrow on Wed, 02/22/2012 - 2:22am.
And your explanation satisfies my parallel argument that "Homeless" must have been just as negligible during Bush 41's term as it continued to be under Clinton's.
Both of us know it wasn't solved overnight.
You're contradicting yourself Jer
Submitted by Denny Crane on Mon, 02/20/2012 - 9:19pm.
First you say it was a palpable trend during the Clinton years, and now you are saying it was a non story because the percentage was a little different.
Bull Crap.
It was a non story during the Clinton years because A) It was a Democrat in the White house and B) Conservatives know that income disparity in America is a non issue. The quality of life and the toys one has are a result of ones hard work.
The only reason it was an issue during the Bush years is because A) Bush is a Republican and B) The media uses it to try and cause a rift between people to make their guy look better.
I very well remember the late 90's and how Clinton was the best president ever, and I remember the last decade where 75% of reporting about Bush always had a negative twist to it. It's a non story that the media continues to push and push and push, they have help from big education too.
We Are The 53%
No, I'm not, Denny....
Submitted by Jer on Wed, 02/22/2012 - 12:47am.
Other than the concession my choice of words--"no story"--was poor. It was misleading because it implied there was no reporting at all about income inequality during the 90's. I do believe there were articles on the topic, but not enough--and not enough public malcontent--to propel it to the level of a high-profile and frequently debated issue during that time.
I think it had nothing or very little to do with protecting Clinton, and that the author's theory in the excerpt I quoted is a plausible one. I'm sure you, and most folks at NB, disagree with that assessment.
By the way, while much of the media may have questioned the wisdom of pursuing Clinton's impeachment and removal from office, the pundits--left, center, and right--were virtually unanimous in condemning his conduct.
Jer
"--virtually unanimous in condemning his conduct"? Who, ---
Submitted by matthewdean on Wed, 02/22/2012 - 1:16am.
then, was saying that Clinton's sex life should be considered private?
Wouldn't that be the lib pundits whom you are saying were virtually unanimous in condemning his conduct?
Must depend on what the meaning of "virtually" is. Or "unanimous". Or "condemning".
Maybe "conduct" ?
How about the meaning of "his"?
Who he ?
MD
Jer, an interesting article.
Submitted by Par for the Course on Mon, 02/20/2012 - 8:06am.
Income Inequality went Up 12 Percent under Clinton, Zero under Bush
Par...
Submitted by Jer on Mon, 02/20/2012 - 8:55am.
The super-rich will generally be disproportionately negatively impacted by recessions, particularly contractions produced by a collapsing stock market or bursting bubbles, but they are also far more capable of withstanding the vicissitudes of a down economy than are those living paycheck to paycheck and are now faced with even a five per cent loss in income. The latter will have little sympathy for the well-heeled CEO whose earnings on investments took a pounding and whose annual compensation may have been substantially reduced and consequently will be forced to get by on a measly six mil a year instead of ten.
As touched on in the response to Denny, Mr. and Mrs. 'Average Joe' won't complain so much about the extra millions the Trumps of America are making when they are also reaping the benefits of a flourishing economy. But once hard times hit, that inter-class congeniality will stop on a dime.
Jer
Doesn't this pull the lynch-pin...
Submitted by ontheright on Mon, 02/20/2012 - 2:14pm.
...on the entire OWS arugment? You know the one. The evil 1%ers vs. the hapless 99%ers and the "income ineqality" that separates the two?
"The super-rich will generally be disproportionately negatively impacted by recessions..."
But wait...I don't understand. You mean there isn't this so-called out of control "wealth disparity" after all?
I always thought the OWS thingy was just a pot/dope/sex fest ala their parent's Woodstock - now we know it's true.
I see...
Submitted by Unsane on Mon, 02/20/2012 - 5:46pm.
So you see the tax code as nothing more than a get-even mechanism to punish and steal from successful people in order to assuage your guilt over the fact that there are (and always have been and always will be) people who can't manage their finances?
"CONSUMED DEMOCRACY RETURNS A SOCIALIST REGIME" - Slayer, "Fictional Reality", from Divine Intervention (1994)
No, Unsane...
Submitted by Jer on Wed, 02/22/2012 - 1:16am.
You don't see at all. I don't feel that way, and never have.
Jer
I see...
Submitted by Unsane on Wed, 02/22/2012 - 7:36am.
Yet you cheerfully ally yourself with a party that DOES feel that way, full of people that feel that way.
And from what I see here, you think that there is such an issue as "income inequality" when there is none.
"CONSUMED DEMOCRACY RETURNS A SOCIALIST REGIME" - Slayer, "Fictional Reality", from Divine Intervention (1994)
Your posts do not refute the
Submitted by stratman on Mon, 02/20/2012 - 12:56pm.
Your posts do not refute the graph from the AFL-CIO or Noel's comments. The graph compares CEO pay to Worker pay. Your posts do not address this topic.
I don't get it...
Submitted by Unsane on Mon, 02/20/2012 - 5:46pm.
CEOs don't work?
"CONSUMED DEMOCRACY RETURNS A SOCIALIST REGIME" - Slayer, "Fictional Reality", from Divine Intervention (1994)
No, CEO's Are Parasites
Submitted by stratman on Mon, 02/20/2012 - 6:15pm.
(sarcasm/off)
I take you were using sarcasm too, right?
It's the AFL-CIO. They are going to accentuate class division as much as possible. It's amazing they showed a negative slope at all in the graph.
My explanation. Hope you like.
Submitted by Unsane on Mon, 02/20/2012 - 6:44pm.
Point taken, but I was actually addressing a pet peeve.
I am positive you were quoting the union jokers, but the pet peeve is this (you may agree): I TIRE of the "working class", the "worker". As I pointed out in a class once, the "working class" is something like 98% of us.
"CONSUMED DEMOCRACY RETURNS A SOCIALIST REGIME" - Slayer, "Fictional Reality", from Divine Intervention (1994)
Like
Submitted by stratman on Mon, 02/20/2012 - 7:26pm.
I am down with the shhtruggle. ('struggle' pronounced a la Michelle Obama)
I have known some wealthy people and only one of them did little work. A second one wanted to but her partners wouldn't let her do much of anything. Everyone else with wealth worked. In contrast, most of the people I knew that didn't work were on the government dole.
The working class thing reeks of Marxism, especially coming from the AFL-CIO. I'm surprised the AFL-CIO didn't use some disgusting descriptor for CEO's.
I am not a worker
Submitted by Denny Crane on Mon, 02/20/2012 - 9:22pm.
I hate that term.
I am an employee.
We Are The 53%
Workers Of The World Unite
Submitted by stratman on Fri, 02/24/2012 - 5:08pm.
I'm not a provider, but they still call me that.
I didn't attempt to refute the graph, strat...
Submitted by Jer on Wed, 02/22/2012 - 1:50am.
I criticized the lack of data sources, methodology, and definition of terms. Those very deficiencies make it easy to criticize the graph but difficult to refute.
But however the graph may be interpreted, it alone fails to prove Noel's assertion that income inequality has been plummeting since Clinton's presidency. Again, the study which I excerpted previously--as have other published analyses of economic data over the past century--reached conclusions diametrically opposed to Noel's. That's not to say the latter are impervious to legitimate criticism as well.
Jer
LOL
Submitted by stratman on Wed, 02/22/2012 - 2:12pm.
Sure you did, Jer. You attempted to undermine and disprove the premise of the article, but you tried using disparate data.
You seemed to have confused CEO's with All Wealthy. As I said, Noel's article, and previous posts on this matter, is about CEO pay versus Employee pay, not ALL WEALTHY pay versus ALL OTHERS pay.
Your text presented no proof to the contrary of what Noel said, has been saying, or the AFL-CIO graph.
If you are finished giggling, strat...concentrate
Submitted by Jer on Fri, 02/24/2012 - 4:03am.
The issues I addressed concerned the central theme of the article--income inequality--rather than with purported differentials in average CEO/worker compensation. The latter involved measurements which appeared largely insusceptible to being either proved or disproved based on the associated information readily accessible, i.e. none. Frankly, a random image of a graph [the linked image was simply a replica of what was published in the blog and could just as easily have been generated by an eighth grade math student using purely hypothetical numbers] is, facially, so suspect in both provenance and probative value that to consider it useful evidence would be sheer folly. [Who are the workers? AFL-CIO members?...All union?...non-union?...Every employee in the nation?...Who are the CEOs surveyed?...The top 100?...The Fortune 500 chief execs?...every CEO in America?....Have the defined groups and mode of analysis remained constant for each data point year?....How is "pay" defined?...Have the definitions and methodology been consistently applied throughout the time frame under scrutiny?]
As a result of concerns in the foregoing areas, it made no sense to contest the statistical conclusions reflected by the graph. However, even if taken as true--and after a good deal of bouncing from one web page and website to another since my earlier posts, I managed to locate a similar graph as well as a potpourri of related and peripheral details--the findings would establish only that the gap between average CEO pay and average worker pay had spiked in the year 2000 just before the bursting of the dot.com bubble. But relying on that factor and no other, the argument was offered in Noel's article and adjudged validated that the "myth" of rising income inequality post-2000 had thereby been "debunked" and was actually "plummeting".
It is THAT argument which I suggest does not necessarily follow from the graph no matter how it is interpreted, and, is at the very least rendered debatable by the two sources I linked in my previous comments which documented, according to the publications by the CBO and Saez respectively, the still growing 'share of income" divide between those in the uppermost percentile and those below.
Jer
.
You Still Fail To Refute The Graph
Submitted by stratman on Fri, 02/24/2012 - 5:06pm.
You first words in your first post on this thread were concerned with the AFL-CIO graph. I was responding to this point. The rest of your post dealt with an entirely different set of data points not addressed in the AFL-CIO graph. You are free to widen the conversation any way you want, Jer, but the focal point of Noel's article and your introductory point was the graph.
The fact is, your previously posted data did not address the graph and you failed to refute the graph or this issue that Noel, or whomever, has discussed previously. Now you link an AFL-CIO article from 2009 which supports the latest AFL-CIO graph. As such, your last post adds nothing that refutes or questions the decreased disparities in CEO pay versus Employee pay since the explosion during the Clinton years.
Further research on NewsBusters seems to point to Gary Hall as the poster to introduce the AFL-CIO graph - twice - here and here. Note Gary discusses the CBO data in addition to CEO vs Employee pay, as well as an intriguing question of why 1979 was chosen as the first year of the study (Democrat talking point bias?). Mr. Hall also offers a link to The Tax Foundation, pointing out the reduction in income for the top earners following the Clinton years. Denny Crane offers his insights here on pay disparities here. BKeyser offers his analysis of wealth here, noting that the Middle Class benefited most during the Bush years. Clay Waters, in an article published on MRC.org, quoted
MRC's Julia A. Seymour and Amy Menefee in 2007 not only wrote about the decrease in CEO to Employee pay gap but also about the fallacy of Zero-Sum approach to pay, fairness in relation to income, whether a divide changed at all, and if appropriate data was considered in the first place:
If you have an issue with the precise wording of Noel's article then you should take it up with him. In the meantime, it's your prerogative to continue to post inarticulate apples to oranges comparisons in order to obfuscate or tarnish, but so far failed to refute, the topic presented in the graph. If you do have precise data that refutes the point Noel made, the one represented in the AFL-CIO graph, I will, in the spirit of Newt Gingrich, cheerfully recognize your efforts
(When asked in the last debate, the one word Gingrich used to describe himself - cheerful)
You have it wrong Jer
Submitted by exboyracer on Mon, 02/20/2012 - 2:26pm.
Accuracy is not the point -- the myth is the point.
sheeesh! there ya go again...
Submitted by wizardjr on Mon, 02/20/2012 - 1:46am.
using them facts, tsk tsk tsk
"Facts!! Facts?!? We don' neeed no steenkin facts!!" - the LSM
Some Credit To The AFL-CIO
Submitted by stratman on Mon, 02/20/2012 - 4:26am.
This topic and its conclusion has been explored in multiple articles presented on NewsBusters, so none of this is a surprise to regular readers of NewsBusters, at least the headlines. What is news is the AFL-CIO reporting similar trends in their graph.
As long as the data the graph represents is verifiable and legitimate, then the AFL-CIO graph is a representative cartoon of trends. The key here is whether the AFL-CIO is telling the whole story as the Left are not want to do.
FYI, the X and Y axis were defined in the title of the graph: Average CEO To Average Worker Pay Ratio. While one may want raw data to determine the veracity of the plotted graph, the graph is labeled with sufficient information to represent trends. Also, there is no rule that says all points on either the X or Y axis must be linear.
There you go
Submitted by exboyracer on Mon, 02/20/2012 - 2:26pm.
Facts don't count -- good for you
Exboyracer
Submitted by stratman on Mon, 02/20/2012 - 2:51pm.
Are you earnest or facetious? Your post unclear in its approach and I want to give you an opportunity to clarify as this is the first thread you've posted on in your 1 year 17 week membership and therefore no record of your mannerism and ideological filter.
Not a problem
Submitted by Unsane on Mon, 02/20/2012 - 10:28am.
As long as humanity has unequal distributions of skill, drive, and ambition, there will ALWAYS be "income inequality".
And "income inequality" is not a problem, especially in dynamic societies such as what exists in the United States.
The only people who think "income inequality" is a problem are those ruled by envy and utter hatred for their fellow man.
"CONSUMED DEMOCRACY RETURNS A SOCIALIST REGIME" - Slayer, "Fictional Reality", from Divine Intervention (1994)
This...
Submitted by ontheright on Mon, 02/20/2012 - 1:46pm.
...AMEN!
It's obvious we need....
Submitted by Goldni007 on Mon, 02/20/2012 - 1:28pm.
... to tax ourselves to success. Nevermind increased global competitiveness, education and skills afa manufacturing and technology jobs. We need to mimic Greece. There they don't have as great an income inequality as us. Its more equally distributed there and much more fair.
“The time has come to acknowledge that it is counterfeit objectivity the liberal media try to sell consumers.” – Sarah Palin
Is it just me or did any one
Submitted by exboyracer on Mon, 02/20/2012 - 2:24pm.
Is it just me or did any one notice that these graphs are for CEOs only and that the data points are compressed and stretched so they have nothing to do with the lines.. Curious it must be my crappy monitor.
Ah, you were fooled by the title 'Average CEO to Average Worker'
Submitted by SickofLibs on Mon, 02/20/2012 - 6:33pm.
The chart is pretty self-explanatory, so I'm sure it's not a monitor problem.
But maybe you should contact the AFL-CIO who created the chart and ask them about the missing data for 1980-2000.