Everybody expects politicians to lie, especially during an election year. You can bet the rent money on it.

Among the many lies we can expect to hear this election year, none will be bigger or more often repeated, in the media as well as by politicians, than the lie that there is a widening income gap between the rich and the poor.

Why is that a lie, when there are so many statistics that seem to substantiate it?

Let's start at square one and take it a step at a time.

First of all, there is a fundamental difference between statistical categories and flesh-and-blood human beings.

When there is a growing disparity between one statistical category and another statistical category over time, that does not mean that there is a corresponding growing disparity between flesh-and-blood human beings over time, since human beings move from one statistical category to another.

The statistical categories in this case are income brackets. There is no question that incomes in the top income brackets have risen both absolutely and relative to the bottom income brackets.

The joker is that millions of people move from one income bracket to another.

The even bigger joker is that taxpayers whose incomes were in the bottom 20 percent in 1996 had a 91 percent increase in incomes by 2005.

Meanwhile, taxpayers in the top one-hundredth of one percent -- "the rich" or "superrich" if you believe politicians and the media -- had their incomes drop by 26 percent over those very same years.

Obviously, when millions of people's incomes nearly double in a decade, many of them move up out of the bottom income bracket. Similarly, when other people who were at the top see their income drop by about one-fourth, many of them drop out of that bracket.

When we talk about "the rich" and "the poor" we mean rich and poor human beings, not rich and poor statistical brackets. Yet politicians and the media treat people and statistical categories as if they were the same thing.

Part of the reason is that data on statistical brackets are more numerous and easier to find, whether from Census Bureau statistics or from a variety of other sources. Continued...