Can't Stop the Idiocy

I think I've probably used this title for a blog post before, but when you've had a blog as long as I've had, and come to be ashamed of how poorly written it is as I have, you try to put things like that out of your mind. I imagine I'll have another post with this title next week.
I know I wrote my review of "You Can't Be President" already, and the idea was to get all my hatred for the book out of my system, but as I've kept reading, I've come across more and more idiotic statements from MacArthur.
Sometimes books specify on their title page that you can quote the book for the purposes of a scholarly review. Now, I already know MacArthur has pretty high standards for who can be called a "scholar" (and Joshua Muravchik doesn't pass muster), but I think this counts as a scholarly review, since I'm going to back my critique up with some philosophy and stuff. Plus, MacArthur's title page doesn't say jack about quoting, so suck it, Johnny.
Here he is bemoaning the falicy of the American ideal of economic mobility: "Of the poorest fifth of American families surveyed in 1988, 53.3 percent were still in the bottom fifth of the economic ladder in 1998. Another 23.6 percent made it up one rung to the second-lowest quintile of income earners, 12.4 percent made it to the third, 6.4 percent reached the second, and only 4.3 percent settled in the top fifth" (149).
I read those data and I am amazed at just how MUCH economic mobility there is in this country! What this is saying is that, given a cohort of the nation's poorest people, within only 10 years nearly half of them will have advanced out of that group, and over 4% have become the richest of Americans. If we say there's a 50% chance of moving out of the group every decade, then someone born poor, by the end of the average lifespan of 70ish years, has a 1-((1/2)^7) chance of not being poor any more, which is 99.21875%. (And yes, I'm exchanging "bottom 20th percentile" for "poor," but if more than 1 out of five people counts as poor, the word "poor" doesn't really have much meaning any more.)
MacArthur saves his best whining for the statistics about how FEW rich people become poor in ten-year's time. "53.2 percent of people in the top fifth of income earners in 1988 remained in the top bracket a decade later, 23.2 percent fell to the second-highest bracket, 14.9 percent dropped to the third quintile, 5.7 percent fell to the fourth quintile, and 3.0 to the fifth quintile" (149).
Again, the richest Americans have a nearly 50-50 chance of no longer being so in just ten-year's time. But to listen to people like MacArthur tell it, "The rich get richer while the poor get poorer." The rich as a group might control a larger share of the nation's wealth, but who is IN that group is constantly changing, and controlling a larger share of a growing base doesn't mean that the other amounts are shrinking. Hence the poor don't get poorer, they just get not poor much more slowly than the rich get more rich.
What really gets me angry, though, is when MacArthur complains that rich kids aren't becoming poor kids at a large enough pace: "Only .5 percent of children belonging to the richest quintile fell to the poorest quintile 10 years later, and only 1.7 percent dropped into the lowest two brackets" (150).
Now you're going to take your class warfare out on kids? I thought juvenile poverty was something to combat. It turns out it's something we WANT to have happen, as long as it happens to the children of the filthy rich. After complaining, "Oh, man, if you're born poor you should just give up because the cards are stacked against you, man," he doesn't see childhood affluence as a means of ensuring a lifetime free from the worry of poverty. Only SOME people shouldn't be poor, I guess. (And given his views on the estate tax, evidently MacArthur wants us all to start out poor, even though his statistics "prove" that being born poor makes you stay that way.)
So MacArthur has proven, in a round-about way, what is true of liberal economic policy: it seeks to make everyone equal by making everyone equally poor. Conservative economic policy, however, doesn't care about equality, and just seeks to raise all income earners. When the number one health problem of America's poor is obesity, it's questionable just how "poor" poor people are. Just because you don't have as much as someone else doesn't mean you're hurting.