Inequality is decreasing---AFF evidence is doomerism.
James Pethokoukis, 1-12-2024, senior fellow and the DeWitt Wallace Chair at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he analyzes US economic policy, "When It Comes to the State of the American Economy, Let’s Keep It Real," American Enterprise Institute - AEI, https://www.aei.org/economics/when-it-comes-to-the-state-of-the-american-economy-lets-keep-it-real/, KL
Of course, if your goal is merely to spread misinformation—kind of common social media—you’re probably not too concerned about getting the facts wrong over and over and over. Such a person is also probably not too interested in info suggesting American poverty is way lower than many people think. As a group of economists write in the new study “Evaluating the Success of the War on Poverty since 1963 Using an Absolute Full-Income Poverty Measure”: “While the official poverty rate fell from 19.5% in 1963 to 10.5% in 2019, our absolute full-income poverty measure—which uses a fuller income measure and updates thresholds only for inflation—fell from 19.5% to 1.6%.”
Or how about a recent study by Gerald Auten and David Splinter that found that income inequality has changed little over time, challenging the widespread notion that it has substantially increased. Specifically, they discovered that the top one percent of income earners received nine percent of after-tax income in 2019, only a slight increase from eight percent in 1960. Then there’s research by my AEI colleague Michael Strain that found income inequality across all households—after accounting for taxes and government transfers and estimated with a Gini coefficient—fell by more than five percent between 2007 and 2019.
The impulse to push doom and gloom is alluring, I know. So on it goes, another day, another questionable stat overstating economic troubles. As such the good work countering such presenting economic reality also continues.