(N. Gregory Mankiw is a professor of economics at Harvard. He was an adviser to President Bush and is advising Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, in the campaign for the Republican presidential nomination.)
Three fragments from Greg Mankiw's column in the New York TIMES, which I finally got around to reading:
According to Emmanuel Saez, an economist at the University of
California, Berkeley, for the richest Americans — those in the top 0.01 percent of the distribution — the percentage of income derived from capital fell to 25 percent in 2004 from 70 percent in 1929.< hah! Greg doesn't mention that the vast majority of this fall is due to the Great Collapse of the early 1930s and World War II.
If your image of the typical rich person is someone who collects
interest and dividend checks and spends long afternoons relaxing on his yacht, you are decades out of date. The leisure class has been replaced by the working rich.< no comment.
None of these calculations, however, say whether the rich are paying their fair share. Fairness is not an economic concept. If you want to talk fairness, you have to leave the department of economics and head over to philosophy.<
he doesn't know much about economics departments, does he? Or maybe Feldstein purged all talk of "fairness" from the Harvard department. http://select.nytimes.com/mem/tnt.html?emc=tnt&tntget=2007/07/15/business/yourmoney/15view.html&tntemail0=y -- Jim Devine / "The tooth fairy teaches children that they can sell body parts for money." -- David Richerby
