Readers Respond to "The Myth of Income Inequality"

INCOME INEQUALITY“The Myth of Income Inequality” [Skeptic], Michael Shermer ignores that poverty among Americans, particularly youths, is far worse than in other advanced nations. It ruins the lives and educational chances of at least a fifth of young Americans, which makes a mockery of his claim that the U.S. is still the land of equal opportunity.

BRUCE J. BIDDLE

Shermer's statistics fail to support his argument. He first states that income (not wealth) has not changed much by comparing the relatively affluent 1979 with 2010, the aftermath of the Great Recession. The data he cites include government transfers such as welfare payments and unemployment as “income.” Such transfer payments go up dramatically in a recession.

He then asserts that the “pie” of national wealth got bigger between 2012 and 2013. Overall wealth went up then primarily because the stock market was making 30 percent gains after the Great Recession, and corporations were making record unreinvested profits. Who do you suppose benefited from that growth?

Shermer goes on to argue that movement into different income groups was higher within the top 1 percent and top 0.01 percent slices of income taxpayers between 1996 and 2005 than among the 20 percent slices of lower taxed groups. Ignoring dramatic changes in tax policy in those years, there is simply no way to expect that anything, taxpayers included, will remain within a narrow range as often as within a range 20 or 2,000 times larger.

HUGH WALKUP

Comparing the income of rich and poor people is misleading. The majority of the rich don't collect much as salaries or wages; they have other methods of wealth accumulation, such as capital gains, which are reported only when an asset is sold. You need to look elsewhere than IRS records to discover how much the rich get richer.

, by Tavis Smiley and Cornel West, asserts that from 1983 to 2009, the top 20 percent took 100 percent of the wealth gain, and the bottom 60 percent net worth.

RICHARD USCHOLD

, The Moral Arc, .

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http://ift.tt/1mAiyC6.

POTTY TO POTABILITY“Bottoms Up,” Olive Heffernan's article about converting sewage to tap water, one important factor was omitted: reliability. No set of equipment runs perfectly forever; unexpected problems always arise and often escalate to levels that could easily cause dangerous health problems.

With tap water as the product, extreme measures of automation and quality monitoring must be applied to handle all possible faults in the system and to shut it down at the first indication of a problem.

R. W. LOWRIE

Heffernan's description of a process by which sewage is treated to become potable tap water includes a step to remove salts called reverse osmosis. What's not obvious is why this is easier than treating seawater, which is even more plentiful.

GREG ARZOOMANIAN

The article says purified wastewater contains substances such as hand cleanser “in such minute doses as to be harmless.” But if the water is continually recycled and these compounds are not broken down, might they become more concentrated over time? Also, can we really assume that they are harmless in minute doses?

TOM FITZ

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ERRATA“Giant Bubbles of the Milky Way,” by Douglas Finkbeiner, Meng Su and Dmitry Malyshev, referred to M42 as a nearby galaxy with Fermi bubbles. M42 is a nebula. The authors meant to speak of the M82 galaxy.

” by Annie Sneed [Advances], describes the application of the anti-HIV microbicide tenofovir gel, now in testing, as occurring before sex. It is instead applied both before and after sex.