Even More Fun With Charts: Making the Poor Look Rich

Lies, damned lies and statistics brought to life in the tale of three bar graphs.

From one of the included links

[I]f you add up all the lines of income over $200,000, you get around $2 trillion. (I may be off, because I’m eyeballing it, but I’m not off by much.) That obviously far exceeds the nearly $1.4 trillion accruing to the $100-200,000 set. And it undermines rather than bolsters (though does not disprove) Reihan’s argument that “the collective political influence of the upper-middle-class is greater than that of the ultra-rich.”

And it’s true that the collective influence of the middle class is greater than that of the rich. If our foundational principles included “one economic class, one vote,” there might be a point to the WSJ graph. But since it’s one person, one vote, you have to normalize the income by the number of people.