Similarly, many of the worries that preoccupy those now in middle age will seem inconsequential when they reach retirement. The point is that our interests and worries change over the course of our lives. That is, instead of acknowledging and incorporating peoples' varying stages of life into any discussions of poverty and tax reform, many commentators look just at the current period, and evaluate only the immediate impact of a new policy, as if people's lives were static.
Income distribution offers a particularly good example of ill-formed policy analysis.
Advocates for an interventionist and redistributionist state argue that the distribution of income as it currently stands is unjust. Many commentators judge this change in the relative distribution of income to be unfair. The problem with this judgement is that it fallaciously assumes that people are fixed in their income stations. That is, the discussion assumes that the same families are trapped in low income for the full decade. The Canadian data on income mobility, although not as extensive as American statistics, suggests a very different picture.