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.