JohnStOnge wrote:The average family income can go up while wages remain stagnant. I'm quite sure the Walton family's income has risen over dramitically. But even assuming your numbers are correct, household incomes were bound to rise as the number of two income families rose. Regardless, working class people making more money while saving less and having less equity in their homes (ie: losing wealth), and losing healthcare and retirement benefits is still not a good thing. The Rich are getting richer.
BTW, it would be interesting to track the numbers through our lost decade of the Bush years to the present to see where middle class wealth currently stands compared to 1975.
If you have Excel on your computer you can download a table to gain insight into some of the issues you raise from the Census Bureau web page at
http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/h ... ertoc.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; . The table, Table P-7, is down the page a little. Included in that table are median inflation adjusted
Individual incomes 1974 - 2008. Because it's individuals, the numbers are not affected by having more than one member of a family working. Because the estimates are estimates of medians, the numbers are not biased upwards by very high incomes. The median is the midpoint. 50 percent are above it and 50 percent below it. So it won't go up just because the rich get richer while everybody else stays the same are becomes worse off. It's a good measure of what the "typical" income is.
The median 1975 individual income inflation adjusted to be expressed in 2008 dollars was $20,609. The median individual income in 2008 was $26,513. So, in inflation adjusted term, the "typical" individual American had an income about 29% higher than that of the "typical" individual American in 1975.
I'd say median individual income didn't change much during the Bush Administration. It kind of wobbled up and down. It was a little higher in 2006 and 2007 than it was at the end of the Clinton Administration then took a downtic in 2008 to be a little lower.
Because Table P7 also includes mean individual incomes as well as numbers of income earners you can also calculate an estimate of total income generated. In inflation adjusted terms, more than twice as much income (2.2 times) was generated in 2008 than in 1975. That bears upon the point that wealth is not a static quantity. It's not a fixed quantity so that one person getting more means somebody else has to get less.
That extra $6,000 occurred as benefits were cut and payroll taxes increased. And do you think it comes close to paying for the rising costs of housing, tuition, and healthcare? What were the median prices for those three things in 1974?
Yes, productivity has increased but at the expense of the middle class. Economist David Cay Johnston sums it up nicely here:
"What is the social utility of creating a society whose rules generate a doubling of output per person but provide those at the top with 37 times the gain of the vast majority? ...
Is a ratio of gain of 37 to 1 from the top to the vast majority beneficial? Is it optimal? Does it provide the development, support, and initiative to maximize the nation’s gain? Are we to think that the gains of the top 398 or 400 taxpayers are proportionate to their economic contributions? Does anyone really think that heavily leveraged, offshore hedge fund investments are creating wealth, rather than just exploiting rules to concentrate wealth, while shifting risks to everyone else?"
http://economistsview.typepad.com/econo ... ealth.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
And here's some more interesting points raised by Matt Yglesias (complete with dep. of labor and census bureau graphs)about the wage stagnation debate including the neo-liberal response that at least we have cheap, quality products to buy.
http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archi ... debate.php" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;