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by graevy 1285 days ago
your source, some guy on twitter from the "american enterprise institute" marketing his book "the american dream is not dead", is cherrypicking from the low to high points of the business cycle:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N

from a dataset which actually tracks data outside that range:

https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2022-11/58353-HouseholdInco...

a more robust dataset, which you would get by simply searching "US real median household income" and opening the first result citing census data, indicates that, charitably, real median household income has risen about 25% since 1980:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=bOeD

wikipedia's article, which has thoroughly succumbed to link rot, in addition to citing the above data, also provides historical census data neatly summarized on page 5 of this census report pegging an increase at about 15-20% since 1964:

https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...

this took me 3 minutes

1 comments

The difference is mainly that the number I linked is "after taxes and transfers".

Also surely 2019 is not the peak of the business cycle? Feb 2020 is.

Peak-to-now real income is up for bottom 50% of households since then (https://realtimeinequality.org/?id=income&incomeend=09012022...) but flat for the rest due to inflation.