47% OR IS IT 74%? I love that this issue is getting popularized. This article tr

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/five-myths-about-the-47-percent/2012/09/21/57dc7bbe-0341-11e2-8102-ebee9c66e190_story.htmlTHE 47% OR IS IT 74%?

I love that this issue is getting popularized. This article tries to debunk a few myths but misses out on a few important and related statistics:

a) something close to 74% of people join the tax paying majority at some point in their lives. The young, immigrants and the old of course, are not. The people of productive age of course are. So, it’s true that at any given point less than half of americans pay taxes. But that’s not the same thing as saying that more than half of them will become, or have been, taxpayers.

b) The 1% consists largely of people who are in that 1% for only one or two years – people who make windfalls.

c) About 12% of americans actually qualify as ‘poor’. The rest are either recent immigrants, young or old, and the remainder are those who have made poor reproductive decisions, or have other problems that leave them to the left of the curve.

d) Any statistic that makes use of ‘household’ rather than individual numbers means the author is lying. The composition of the family has eroded so significantly since the sixties that any statistical comparison of households is irrelevant. We humans choose spatial independence at all costs. This means more smaller poorer households.