On Oct 2, 9:10*pm, boo-radley wrote:

http://www.newyorker.com/


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAkc03uHmeU

Most people have too much of a sense of decency and too much common
sense to have gone along with those horrors unless someone found a way
to turn off their thinking and turn on their emotions.

That is how Jim Jones led hundreds of people to their deaths at
Jonestown. On a much larger scale, that is how Lenin created a regime
of mass murder in Russia, how Hitler did the same thing in Germany and
Mao in China.

Yet we seem to be no more aware of a need to be on guard against
demagoguery today, in the 21st century, than those people who looked
up with open-mouthed adulation at Adolf Hitler in the 1930s and at
numerous other demagogues, large and small, around the world
throughout the turbulent 20th century.

Many people find it thrilling that the mantra of "change" is ringing
out across the land during this election year. But let's do what the
politicians hope that we will never do -- stop and think.

It is doubtful whether there is a single human being in this entire
country who is 100 percent satisfied with everything that is going on.
In other words, everybody is for change.

The real difference between liberals and conservatives is in which
specific things they want to change, and in what way.

Milton Friedman was the leading conservative thinker of his time but
he wanted to radically change the Federal Reserve, the school system,
and the tax system, among other things.

Everybody is for change. They differ on the specifics. Uniting people
behind the thoughtless mantra of "change" means asking for a blank
check in exchange for rhetoric. That deal has been made many times in
many places -- and millions of people have lived to regret it. [Tens
of millions more have died because of it.]

It is not too much to ask politicians to talk specifics, instead of
trying to sweep us along, turning off our minds and turning on our
emotions, with soaring rhetoric.

Optimists might even hope for some logical consistency and hard
facts.

Barack Obama says that he wants to "heal America and repair the
world." One wonders what he will do for an encore and whether he will
rest on the seventh day.

That we have so many people who are ready to be swept along by such
rhetoric is a huge danger, for it means that the fate of this great
nation is at risk from any skilled demagogue who comes along.

Barack Obama says that he wants to "heal" the country while at the
same time promoting the idea that all sorts of people are victims for
whom he will fight.

Being divisive while proclaiming unity is something you can do only in
the world of rhetoric.

Senator Obama has no monopoly on demagoguery, however. Former Senator
John Edwards has been playing this game longer, even if not as
effectively in the political arena.

John Edwards built his own fortune in the courtroom, depicting babies
with birth defects as victims of the doctors who delivered them. The
cost of such demagoguery has gone far beyond the tens of millions of
dollars that Edwards pocketed for himself from gullible juries.

Such lawsuits based on junk science have driven up the cost of medical
care, not only directly but even more so indirectly, by leading to an
increase in Caesarean births and other costly "defensive medicine" to
protect doctors rather than patients.

The world of John Edwards, like the world of Barack Obama, is a world
of victims, whose savior he claims to be.

What is scary is how little interest the public and the media have in
the actual track record of political saviors and the cry of generic
"change."

America is not czarist Russia or Iran under the shah, so that people
might think that any change was bound to be for the better. Yet even
in those despotic countries the changes -- to communism and to the
ayatollahs -- made them far worse.

The time is long overdue for voters to demand specifics instead of
rhetoric that turns their emotions on and their minds off.

Everybody expects politicians to lie, especially during an election
year. You can bet the rent money on it.

Among the many lies we can expect to hear this election year, none
will be bigger or more often repeated, in the media as well as by
politicians, than the lie that there is a widening income gap between
the rich and the poor.

Why is that a lie, when there are so many statistics that seem to
substantiate it?

Let's start at square one and take it a step at a time.

First of all, there is a fundamental difference between statistical
categories and flesh-and-blood human beings.

When there is a growing disparity between one statistical category and
another statistical category over time, that does not mean that there
is a corresponding growing disparity between flesh-and-blood human
beings over time, since human beings move from one statistical
category to another.

The statistical categories in this case are income brackets. There is
no question that incomes in the top income brackets have risen both
absolutely and relative to the bottom income brackets.

The joker is that millions of people move from one income bracket to
another.

The even bigger joker is that taxpayers whose incomes were in the
bottom 20 percent in 1996 had a 91 percent increase in incomes by
2005.

Meanwhile, taxpayers in the top one-hundredth of one percent -- "the
rich" or "superrich" if you believe politicians and the media -- had
their incomes drop by 26 percent over those very same years.

Obviously, when millions of people's incomes nearly double in a
decade, many of them move up out of the bottom income bracket.
Similarly, when other people who were at the top see their income drop
by about one-fourth, many of them drop out of that bracket.

When we talk about "the rich" and "the poor" we mean rich and poor
human beings, not rich and poor statistical brackets. Yet politicians
and the media treat people and statistical categories as if they were
the same thing.

Part of the reason is that data on statistical brackets are more
numerous and easier to find, whether from Census Bureau statistics or
from a variety of other sources.

Data based on following actual flesh-and-blood individuals over time
are, however, also available. The statistics quoted above are from the
Treasury Department, which has people's income tax returns, so it is
no problem for them to follow the same people over the years.

You can check out the numbers for yourself in a November 13, 2007
report from the Treasury Department titled "Income Mobility in the
United States from 1996 to 2005." You can find a summary of the same
data in a Wall Street Journal editorial that same day.

These are not the only data that tell a diametrically opposite story
from the usual political and media story that the rich are getting
richer and the poor are getting poorer.

A previous Treasury Department study showed similar patterns in
individual income changes between 1979 and 1988.

Moreover, a study conducted at the University of Michigan, following
the same individuals over an even longer span of time, likewise found
most people moving from income bracket to income bracket over time --
especially among those who began in the bottom 20 percent.

The University of Michigan Panel Survey on Income Dynamics showed
that, among people who were in the bottom 20 percent income bracket in
1975, only 5 percent were still in that category in 1991. Nearly six
times as many of them were now in the top 20 percent in 1991.

There was a summary of the University of Michigan data in the 1995
annual report of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, which also issued
an excerpt titled "By Our Own Bootstraps."

Among the intelligentsia, it is fashionable to sneer at income
mobility as a "Horatio Alger myth" -- and, as someone once said, you
cannot refute a sneer. But, among people who have not yet abandoned
facts for rhetoric, it is worth stopping to consider whether they are
being played for fools by politicians and much of the media.

www.tsowell.com