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Who's rich? Part II

Someone once pointed out that there are at least 50 colleges that claim to be among the top 25 colleges in the country. There is a similar congestion among the 400 "richest" Americans, as shown in data recently released by the Internal Revenue Service.

While much of the liberal media emphasized that these 400 highest income-earners had increased their share of national income between 1992 and 2000, only the Wall Street Journal pointed out that there are more than 2,000 people among these 400 "richest" Americans. How can you squeeze thousands of people into the top 400?

The key to this -- as to so much other nonsense that is trumpeted in the media about "the rich" and "the poor" -- is that we are not talking about the same people when we are making comparisons of different income brackets over a period of years. Most Americans do not stay in the same income bracket for even a decade, much less over a lifetime.

In the case of the Internal Revenue Service data on the 400 highest income-earners in the country, only 21 people were in that category throughout the nine years covered by IRS statistics. In other words, more than 2,000 people passed through this category in the course of nine years but fewer than two-dozen actually stayed there the whole time. ...