Articles like this are exasperating to me because the reporter does not say who performed the analysis and does provide any of the raw data upon which the analysis was based. We also don’t know if the income figures reflect pre-tax or after-tax values because this critical piece of information is not provided. That’s because your job is to absorb the emotional anti-Bush message, not to exercise your intellectual critical reasoning abilities.
Fortunately, I happen to know that detailed income figures are provided by the Tax Policy Center here. Their numbers, which are complete through the year 2004, both confirm these trends and completely debunk this story.
Back Talk: Misleading Income Statistics, Courtesy of the New York Times
