"French economist Thomas Piketty is the darling of the international Left. His book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, argues that in a free economy, wealth is inexorably concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. He credits (!) the two world wars and the Great Depression with temporarily interrupting this process and giving rise to more equality, but now, he says, concentration of wealth has resumed in both Europe and America. Piketty proposes, as a solution, a global tax on wealth. You can imagine the excitement with which Piketty has been received on the Left, especially since his book is based on actual data! It includes charts and graphs that are based on spreadsheets! Even critics of Piketty's theories have generally praised his systematic accumulation of data on the subject of the ownership of wealth. But two reporters for the Financial Times, Chris Giles and Ferdinando Giugliano, took the trouble of checking Piketta's numbers against the source data that he relies on. It turns outto put it bluntlythat Piketty is a fraud. Giles writes: : : I find it entertaining that as to the U.S., Piketty has fabricated data for the years 1870 through 1960, where none exists. : : Perhaps, as the debate unfolds, Piketty will be able to salvage some remnant of his work. At this point, however, Capital In the Twenty-First Century looks like an economics version of Piltdown Man." Full article
Or for our member(s) that doesn't like to read, here's a video discussing the data problems [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2Qjf36n5A8[/youtube]
The Darling of the Left out the actual data just for convenience sake. :lol: Seems to be a common strategy with leftists eg ant-GMO, anti-wheat, anti-corpoartions etc, just publish a series of lies and rely on there being enough gullible people are out there who are too lazy or stupid to do their own homework and you can start a movement.
The question of the actual wealth of the top 10% must surely up for conjecture. Whose figure do you count as gospel... Please don't tell me the governments. Regards Errol 43
The lefts whole problem is they spend too much time worrying about how much wealth the top10% has and finding ways to use force to take it from them. IF the left ever gave a shit about the bottom 50% the first thing they would do is start the fight against central bank manipulated inflation.
