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.
