...only if you exclude from your calculations the taxes the rich do pay.

Alan Reynolds writing in Investor’s Business Daily:

The endless journalistic misuse of the dubious Piketty-Saez data is often driven by a policy agenda.

A recent New York Times editorial about the Piketty-Saez statistics claims that “Bush . . . tax cuts have overwhelmingly benefited the richest. As a result, the tax code does less to narrow the income gap now than it did as recently as 2000.” But Piketty and Saez exclude taxes, so even a huge increase in tax rates on salaries, dividends and capital gains would have no direct effect on their data.

What reverting to such a Europhile tax scheme would do, however, is shift business income back to the corporate tax form again, greatly reduce the realization of capital gains in taxable accounts and invite investors to dump dividend-paying stocks in favor of tax-exempt bonds. As a result, the top 1%’s share would indeed appear to fall in statistics that naively rely on what affluent people choose to report in various boxes on various tax returns.

Such a reduction in visible top income shares would be little more than a bookkeeping illusion. The only certain effect would be that the rest of us would have to bear a larger share of the tax burden.

Read the whole thing.