Good workout to shovel that I bet =P

Nice pictures.

although we were lucky that a lot of the snow dumped just west of us. Our roads are a little crappy, but I think overall it wasn't as bad as it could be.

God, I hate winter.

Perhaps you are missing the point of my objections to income equality. The analogy at the beginning of the Treasury Department study , which likens the income distribution to a hotel, is an understandable one. And it is great that the best rooms are not always occupied by the same person. The problem, though, is that the hotel as a whole is using huge sums of money to make those best rooms better and better, while small shabby ones remain coakroach infested ratholes.

Wouldn't it be better for the hotel as a whole to invest in making their worst rooms better? Not neglecting the premium rooms, and continuing to make improvements there as well, but not exclusively. That is the problem I have with income inequality, as best as can be expressed using that analogy.

I never said that the rich inherited *all* their money. Show me where I did. I did say that many amongst the rich have inherited wealth and privelege from previous generations. By privilege, I mean things like free education in exclusive schools, provided by the parents; high paying jobs obtained through family contacts; Dad's co-signature on a first home loan (perhaps coupled with a little help with the down payment) and so forth.

Now that we have that fundamental fact established: let's move on to the flaws in your piece, especially with respect to my arguments agaisnt the elimination of the estate tax:

1. This Treasury Dept. study, which I have seen before, is an income study, not a wealth study. You really can't possibly make any conclusions about wealth from an income study, because... well, because it's not a study which even takes wealth into account.

2. Even if it was a wealth study, if you compared the total net worth of a sample of people at ten year intervals, I would expect to see a lot of "wealth mobility" too... but a decent chunk of the upward mobility to the highest groups would be due to heirs receiving an inheritance sometime within the ten year window.

So you haven't refuted my points, because you aren't even discussing the same points I brought up. So you might as well have left my name out of your post, but let's look at your analysis of income anyway:

We would expect a good deal of "income mobility" as measured by changes in an individual's income over time even in societies where inherited wealth and privelege were dominant over true mobility from a lower socioeconomic class to an upper class. For instance, a rich young adult may have very little income or no income at all, yet still be "living off the fat of the land", enjoying a privileged lifestyle, cruising thru college on their parents' dime, etc. Then, ten year later, they may have a well paying job and have moved up several notches on the income mobility ladder, but is this really income mobility? And with this in mind, does the study really measure "income mobility"?  Or is the tudy merely measuring "income volatility": fluctuations in income over time?  I would argue the latter is more accurate.  Perhaps we can learn something from the study, but it does not give the complete picture as far as income mobility as far as I'm concerned.

Fortunatley a better measure of "income mobility" which is much more germane to my argument about intergenerational transfers of wealth and privilege can be determined by looking at the variance of an individual's income from their parent's income. A Center for American Progress study analyzed intergenerational income differences from parent to child and came to the following conclusions, among others:

-- Children from low-income families have only a 1 percent chance of reaching the top 5 percent of the income distribution, versus children of the rich who have about a 22 percent chance.

--By international standards, the United States has an unusually low level of intergenerational mobility: our parents’ income is highly predictive of our incomes as adults. Intergenerational mobility in the United States is lower than in France, Germany, Sweden, Canada, Finland, Norway and Denmark. Among high-income countries for which comparable estimates are available, only the United Kingdom had a lower rate of mobility than the United States.

Perhaps more damaging to your conclusion that "hard work" is rewarded in America by upward mobility was this finding from the study:

Households whose adult members all worked more than 40 hours per week for two years in a row were more upwardly mobile in 1990-91 and 1997-98 than households who worked fewer hours. Yet this was not true in 2003-04, suggesting that people who work long hours on a consistent basis no longer appear to be able to generate much upward mobility for their families.

Now, when we were talking about the inheritance tax, we were talking specifically about race, and I was specifically talking about the wealth gap between blacks and whites. What I did say was this:

Much of this [old, inherited] money,
largely held by whites, was not earned by present generations, but it
is the legacy of wealth and privelege from an earlier racist era where
unfair policies excluded blacks from the opportunity to accumulate
wealth, or worse, where white wealth was generated on the back of
blacks, whose own wealth needle was never allowed to budge from zero.

There still is a huge wealth gap between blacks and whites in America, according to this chart showing net worth in 2000:

I am suggesting that these differences are a legacy of slavery and racist polices that survived slavery But am I suggesting drastic measures such as reparation payments? Not at all-- I don't beleive that reparations are realistic politically, feasible logistically, necessary, or even fair. Time cannot be turned back, life is not fair, and so on. I am not in favor of any new race based policies in our country and think that current race-based policies should be gradually phased out. All I am suggesting is to keep and perhaps raise the inheritance tax as compared to the income tax-- a moderate, racially neutral policy which will noetheless serve to gradually smooth out, over the course of generations, the stark racial differences in wealth which we see in the graph above.