By now, several press reports detail the fact household incomes shrank to 1995 levels.
Depending on which model you use, median household income is now around $50,054, down from $50,876 in 2011.
The articles bring in this or that economist to bemoan the ten-year back slide, and this makes or great reading. But there is another graph re-circulating the financial markets that exposes the much larger problem around the decline in median income.
The graphic comes courtesy of DoubleLine Capital, which it recently used in a investing webinar to clients, sourced from The New York Times.
What’s telling is that incomes have never really made any decent progression from the mid-seventies. In thirty years of booms and busts, we’ve averaged only a couple of grand more a year.
But that hasn’t stopped the government from quadrupling our national debt in the meantime.