It’s official. The White House isn’t even trying to make sense on economics.

[babylonsister]

http://tpmcafe.com/blog/coffeehouse/2007/aug/21/it_s_interesting_to_me

WH Incomprehensible on Inequality
By Jared Bernstein | bio

It’s official. The White House isn’t even trying to make sense on economics.

This morning’s NYT reports on IRS data showing that the average family’s income is lower, after inflation, in 2005 than it was in 2000. It’s down about 1%, just under $500, which ain’t chump change. It helps to explain the squeeze many middle- and low-income families speak of, and the dissonance between their experiences and the clamoring of the economy’s cheerleaders (low unemployment! strong job growth! solid fundamentals! yada-yada...).

What growth did occur went largely to millionaires and above. This tiny sliver—one quarter of one percent of all taxpayers—“reaped almost 47% of the total income gains in 2005, compared with 2000.”

Actually, there’s little new here we didn’t know already from Census data and from the work of Piketty and Saez, two economists who carefully track economic inequality.

What’s different is the response by the White House. Regarding the concentration of income growth at the top of the scale, a press spokesman declared that this “is not a very interesting story.” He attributed the lack of average income growth to “the wrenching hits our economy took in 2001 and 2002.”

This is simply indefensible. The White House is constantly touting the strength of the economy, typically in defense of their tax cuts (which themselves exacerbated the skewing of market incomes). But when they get a result they don’t like, they cite events from six years ago that have nothing to do with the mal-distribution of the growth that’s occurred since then.

Well, not exactly nothing. Those events helped empower an administration with little regard for the living standards of working families or the fair distribution of growth. In fact, their economic agenda is actually pretty redistributive. It just goes the wrong way.

[DBoon]

1. "some call you the elite"

"we call you our base"

With a base like that, of course they find this "not very interesting"

[ljm2002]

2. Great logic...

...'He attributed the lack of average income growth to “the wrenching hits our economy took in 2001 and 2002.”'

So why, one might ask, did the income of the top tier grow in spite of the wrenching hits of 2001 / 2002? The answer of course is that Bush's fiscal policies and war profiteering ways helped his rich buddies, and hurt everyone else. In other words the "wrenching hits" excuse is a non-starter.