There is a study coming out today that looks at the upward mobility of Americans economically. We are being told by John Edwards and Mike Huckabee that America has become a place of “rising inequality and shrinking opportunity.” It looks like we are in a place of rising incomes and ample opportunity.
The Treasury study examined a huge sample of 96,700 income tax returns from 1996 and 2005 for Americans over the age of 25. The study tracks what happened to these tax filers over this 10-year period. One of the notable, and reassuring, findings is that nearly 58% of filers who were in the poorest income group in 1996 had moved into a higher income category by 2005. Nearly 25% jumped into the middle or upper-middle income groups, and 5.3% made it all the way to the highest quintile.
Of those in the second lowest income quintile, nearly 50% moved into the middle quintile or higher, and only 17% moved down. This is a stunning show of upward mobility, meaning that more than half of all lower-income Americans in 1996 had moved up the income scale in only 10 years.
Also encouraging is the fact that the after-inflation median income of all tax filers increased by an impressive 24% over the same period. Two of every three workers had a real income gain–which contradicts the Huckabee-Edwards-Lou Dobbs spin about stagnant incomes.
Wealth creation is alive and well in America, despite all the taxes placed on Americans. This type of growth is great, but imagine for a second what it would be like without all the taxes and government programs.
