The poor rich

Showing my usual quick wit and diligence, it's taken me four days to come up with a response to el jefe's scandalous attack on the poor rich. He claims it's inconsistent to believe that the rich pay most of the taxes and that the middle class pay most of the taxes.

So little imagination.

A couple of things are going on, I suspect, one being that el jefe is playing a bit loose, not quite identifying the specific, actual statements that contradict; after that, it's clearly a case of shifting meanings, but that's not the fault of the wasll street journal and its fellow travelers. If income distribution is described by an incline, and it more or less is, then everything depends on where you place the cut-off lines for poor and poor rich, with the middle class in between.



Under almost any scenario that most people, including experts, would draw, most of the income area is going to fall in the middle class. But when people talk about the rich paying most of the taxes, they're almost certainly talking about the per capita share or they're defining "rich" to include something absurd, such as "top 50 percent" or even 25 percent. Add to the mix that such discussions usually involve the income tax, which is progressive, and the "poor rich" proportion becomes larger still. But even then it's unlikely to be larger than the middle class area.

UPDATE: ColumbusGal read this post and said, "I'm starting to think about vanilla."