You are still having trouble with the concept of Science vs Philosophy.
Science is stating the numbers. Such as: ''the share of wealth held by the top 1 percent of households has risen to 35 percent from 21 percent since 1979, while their share of income has more than doubled to around 20 percent.''
Originally Posted by WTF
Okay Bub, lets try some numbers. Since its you, I'll try and keep things simple.
Say for the sake of argument that in 1979, there were 100 apple pies and 100 people. One guy gets 19 pies and the other 99, split 81 pies -- thus they have the equivalent of about 6.5 slices each (assuming 8 slices per pie.) Oh, but wait. That is gross pies. There is a progressive pie tax. The fat guy (from eating so many pies), with 19 pies has to pay 6 of them over to the government -- for a net of 13 pies. The other folks have to pay over a total of 12 pies -- so their net is about 5.5 slices each. You'll note that the rich guy has paid about 1/3rd of all the pie taxes (6 out of 18.)
Now Uncle Ronald cut the pie tax. For the rich guys, he reduced the tax rate from 30% to 20% and for other folks from 15% to 7.5%. Encouraged by this new tax structure, everyone got busy baking pies. Now, there are a total of 300 apple pies that have been produced. There is still one guy that has a lot of pies. But, its not the same guy, the old guy died of hardened arteries from eating too much pie. Instead there is a different guy who invented a better process for making pies and he produced 105 of them. He pays the new lower pie tax of 21 pies and still has a net of 84 of them. There are 195 pies that are split between the other 99 people. They have to pay a pie tax of 15 pies, so they have a net of about 14.5 slices each. The rich guy pays 58% of the pie tax (21 out of 36 pies).
True, The one rich guy (although a different one) has seen his net pie count grow substantially -- from 13 to 84. His gross share of all pies has increased from 19% to 35% even though his share of the pie tax has grown from 33% to 58%. But, the only point that is relevant is that the average Joe has seen his net pie count grow from 5.5 slices to 14.5 slices or a 160% increase. That's enough to induce sugar shock in the lot of them. Everything else is superfluous.