Turn out the lights, the Occupy party is over

According to Alan Reynolds of Cato;

Citing Piketty and Saez, for example, Stiglitz concludes (2012: 7) that, “the rich are getting richer . . . the poor are becoming poorer and more numerous, and . . . the incomes of the middle class are stagnating or falling.”  On the contrary, this paper shows that (1) the rich were becoming much poorer in 2008-2010, that (2) the poor became less numerous whenever the top 1 percent’s share increased, and that (3) real after-tax median household incomes rose by 48.8 percent from 1980 to 2009 (CBO).  Such a wide gap between perception and reality, even among prominent economists, requires more careful reexamination of many alleged facts.

 Which would explain how ordinary people have so much stuff these days--flat screen TVs, computers and handheld devices, automobiles that go 100,000 miles without needing their spark plugs changed, larger houses with more bathrooms....