>>>The study “does not reflect the experience of particular households. Individual households may have moved up or down the income scale if their income rose or fell more than the average for their initial group.”
>
>That's a polite way of saying that the plural of anecdote is not data- so people don't quote stories about the people next door moving up or down as if that proves something. Not sure why you'd post that to me- not a straw man, surely.

It's saying exactly what was pointed out in the very sentence you snipped before what you quoted.
Yet the CBO concedes that the dynamism of the American economy is not properly captured by this analytical approach.

A very important point when using this study to make or justify public policy. As are the key points made by Ryan.


• The question for policymakers is not how best to redistribute a shrinking economic pie. The focus ought to be on increasing living standards, expanding economic opportunity, and promoting upward mobility for all.
• Conventional wisdom on government’s role in inequality often has it backwards: tax reforms have resulted in a more progressive federal income tax; government transfer payments have become less progressive (due in large part to growing entitlement payments to wealthier seniors).
• Rather than further divide Americans, there is growing bipartisan consensus to target corporate welfare, to income-adjust entitlement programs, and to reform the tax code by removing loopholes and lowering barriers to growth.

>>>This is an important distinction, as considerable empirical evidence has made clear that there is a significant amount of movement across income quintiles over time – in other words, there is a lot of income mobility in the U.S. economy. A person working his or her way through college in a relatively low-paying job in year one, for instance, may have climbed into a much higher earnings level by year five.
>
>LOL. Only a particularly foolish straw man would deny quintile movement when that's exactly what the report says. The report says some other stuff too that you don't seem so keen to quote.

If you continue the quote you find the relevance.
Comparing the low-income point in year one with that same low-income point in year five does not speak to this particular individual’s experience, because the individual has moved up over that time. As the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis puts it, since “incomes are not constant over time, the same households do not necessarily remain in the same income quintiles. Thus, comparing income quintiles from different years is a proverbial apples-to-oranges comparison because the households compared are at different stages in their earnings profile.

This is the crux of the issue in the discussion of the top 1%. As you previously stated If you've read Gibbons you'll know that this is as old as civilization and that when a very small minority - say 1% - starts to claim the majority of the wealth and then tells people with nothing that if there is no bread they should eat cake, here we go again. You're implication by here we go again is that the US is repeating a historical cycle based upon income inequality. I am countering that the US is on another path do to the dynamism of our ecomomy and the ability of it's citizenry to move between income levels. The historical examples are of class systems directly preventing income mobility.