This is a similar chart which reads quite differently...

http://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/charts/census/hous...

Also, I think you would be better linking here, which has several versions with differnt groupings (per @r00fus' point) as well as the full discussion behind it:

http://www.aei.org/publication/census-data-on-income-distrib...

It's interesing data, but also missing the last 5 years which are crucial as this is a recent phenomenon. The 3rd chart in the series I think best shows what economists are calling the "lost decade" where we stopped making real progress in upward mobility. Add another 5 years onto those series and I think you would see we are going backwards now.

Edit: Shouldn't the top graph in my link be the same as your link? Now I'm doubting these graphs are even 'correct' (methodology aside)

The difference between the graphs are that the one linked by jusmus88 is illustrating the distribution of incomes of "families", whereas all three in the article you linked are for the distribution of incomes of "households". These are two different ways of analysing the issue that give different answers, and the differences are discussed in the article.

edit: Just to be clear, I'm not making any positive or negative statements about the article, I just wanted to help you work out what it was you had missed, and I think what I described is it.

Thanks for pointing that out! I had saved both images to my phone and flipped back and forth between them to try to understand, and all I could see changing was the data! But you are absolutely correct it's "Families" in one and "Households" in the other. Very interesting distinction...

How does that graph read differently and the captions are from what sources exactly?

I ignored the captions. The data show the bottom 80% experiencing significant wage deflation the last decade in real dollar terms. Hence, falling out of the middle class.

The title accurately of your link was "Census data on income distribution reveal evidence of rising income levels for a rising share of American households", not the opposite.

We just had the biggest recession since the Great Depression. Taking such a short window will of course show wage deflation. You cannot remove the effects from bubble income and expect to keep bubble income.

The overall trend for most slightly bigger windows is wage increase. If a certain wage level meant middle class in the 1960s, or 1970s, or 1980s, or 1990s, then we have a larger ratio of people in that class, not less.

Of course if you define middle class as also increasing in income, then you can play all sorts of tricks. But the fact remain more people than perhaps any but the last decade are richer than ever. All your graphs point to exactly this.

Remember - bubble popped. It takes a while for those effects to smooth out.

A witty saying proves nothing.

That dicing of all incomes into three brackets including the ridiculous $75k+ bracket (for families!) just shows how you can hide truth with graphs.

A graph completely debunks the populist theory, yet you continue to push the narrative that the middle class is "falling out" instead of...you know...getting richer?

Thanks for the downvote because statistical facts on income apparently aren't your cup of tea.

> statistical facts

Didn't downvote you, but you have heard the saying "Lies, damned lies, and statistics", haven't you? Calling a single chart "statistical facts" is laughable at best. Especially when we've seen two versions of that chart (see zaroth's post), with a near identical title (one has "US families", the other "US households") and claiming the same source data from the same blog, showing two very different plots. (Looking more carefully, the trends at least seem similar, so perhaps it is just an issue with the definition of "family" vs. "household"?)

Further, it's pretty clear that simply changing the brackets could result in a very different plot. And that is what we see in the NY Times article, which has the "households" plot but with the income brackets changed slightly and the 2009-2013 data added. In the NYTimes plot it looks like, since 2000, the top bracket has peaked and shrunk, the middle has continued to shrink, and the lower grew. It's a short trend compared to the full graph, but is that the direction we're heading now? So at best, this is all highly subjective, and a perfect example of when "statistical facts" can be manipulated to serve and agenda, populist or otherwise.

In short, nothing was "completely debunked" here, and a great example of why different sides of a debate end up talking past one another instead of acknowledging how complex these things can be. Two groups with different starting positions looked at the same or very similar plots and drew different conclusions. Color me shocked.

Of course people are getting richer in absolute terms, that's not surprising (if you assume technology advances and produces any increase in value at all), but with that comes inflation. Now, the interesting question is not whether people are getting richer or not, not even whether people are getting richer faster than inflation negates those gains. The question is: are the richest X% (for a sufficiently small X) is getting richer much faster than the remaining (100-X)%, and whether that difference in the rate of growth is sufficient to seriously unbalance a country's society?

Even if it isn't, does that concentration of capital make the whole economic system less efficient than it otherwise could be or happens at the expense of basic living conditions for people in the (100-X)% group?

'Constant Dollars' means adjusted for inflation. The bigger problem is there are multiple versions of the same chart floating around and they are significantly different, so methodology questions aside, I no longer even trust the data is sourced correctly.