Yahoo's Income Inequality Charts
futureofcapitalism.com

The most emailed story this morning at Yahoo! News is a piece picking up some charts from Mother Jones about income inequality. The article claims that "over the last 30 years, the gap between rich and poor has widened into a chasm." The article has 27,000 Facebook likes.

The article falls into all the usual traps — failing to distinguish between income and assets or between income and consumption, failing to realize that people travel between different income quintiles over their lifetimes and that families do so over generations, failing to include government transfers such as food stamps or the value of Medicaid in the definition of income. For a more detailed analysis of this issue it's hard to beat the Diana Furchtgott-Roth column cited here.

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Gerald McEntee's Pay
futureofcapitalism.com

The AFL-CIO has unveiled a new "Executive Pay Watch" Web site. Yahoo! News reports on it without making any mention of the salaries of the labor union executives. Bloomberg News does slightly better, mentioning AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka's $283,340 annual compensation and Service Employees International Union President Mary Kay Henry's $253,660 annual compensation. But those are among the less well-paid union leaders. What about the president of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, Gerald McEntee, who federal records show was paid $555,367 in total compensation in 2010, a fact that, outrageously, was omitted from a recent interview/profile of Mr. McEntee by the New York Times' longtime labor reporter, Steven Greenhouse? Or Mr. McEntee's secretary-treasurer at AFSCME, William Lucy, who made $847,810 from the union? What about Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, whose compensation for 2010 was more than $600,000?

Read More...

Yahoo's Income Inequality Charts
futureofcapitalism.com

The most emailed story this morning at Yahoo! News is a piece picking up some charts from Mother Jones about income inequality. The article claims that "over the last 30 years, the gap between rich and poor has widened into a chasm." The article has 27,000 Facebook likes.

The article falls into all the usual traps — failing to distinguish between income and assets or between income and consumption, failing to realize that people travel between different income quintiles over their lifetimes and that families do so over generations, failing to include government transfers such as food stamps or the value of Medicaid in the definition of income. For a more detailed analysis of this issue it's hard to beat the Diana Furchtgott-Roth column cited here.

Read More...

Gerald McEntee's Pay
futureofcapitalism.com

The AFL-CIO has unveiled a new "Executive Pay Watch" Web site. Yahoo! News reports on it without making any mention of the salaries of the labor union executives. Bloomberg News does slightly better, mentioning AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka's $283,340 annual compensation and Service Employees International Union President Mary Kay Henry's $253,660 annual compensation. But those are among the less well-paid union leaders. What about the president of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, Gerald McEntee, who federal records show was paid $555,367 in total compensation in 2010, a fact that, outrageously, was omitted from a recent interview/profile of Mr. McEntee by the New York Times' longtime labor reporter, Steven Greenhouse? Or Mr. McEntee's secretary-treasurer at AFSCME, William Lucy, who made $847,810 from the union? What about Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, whose compensation for 2010 was more than $600,000?

Read More...