The U.S. economy is killing off the middle class

Re:The U.S. economy is killing off the middle class by lazaroclapp on Saturday January 31, 2015 @05:00AM (#8976341)

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?

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Re:The U.S. economy is killing off the middle class by zaroth on Saturday January 31, 2015 @05:12AM (#8976365)

'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.

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