You would have a point if we were talking about individual neighborhoods, but we're not. We are talking about census tracts which are much larger population samples. For instance the income inequality for SF between the bottom 20 and the top 5 is almost 15x (15x higher than the bottom 20%). That's an immense gap that is not accounted for in the heritage study. Using a recruits actual family income is the only accurate measure here.
Anyway the Heritage foundation is a well known conservative spin house. As soon as I read that they did the study, I knew it would be fluff. It's bad PR for the armed forces if people figure out poor people are going out to die for rich people.
Here's a real source that uses pentagon stats.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...110302528.html
- half of recruits come from poor households
- 2/3 come from counties where the median income is below the national median income.
It's a well known fact that poor and lower income individuals make up the bulk of the armed forces (40% of all recruits are from the poor South). The opposite viewpoint isn't even logical.