The Great Income Decline Is Real

For some reason I’ve recently seen a little spate of skepticism over the notion that middle-class incomes have been stagnant for quite a while. I suppose this is a reaction to Bernie Sanders, who certainly has a habit of making things sound a little more catastrophic than they really are. But that’s no reason to doubt the basic fact of income stagnation—at least for some people.

Here are the figures from the Census Bureau for men of different ages:

Since 1980, the income of every men’s age group has declined except for those 55-64—and even that age group has been stagnant since 2000. Now here are women:

Women’s incomes have been rising steadily, though they’re still considerably lower than men’s incomes.

Now, this is cash income and doesn’t include government benefits. And it uses CPI-U-RS as its inflation gauge. You can get different results if you calculate income differently or if you use a different measure of inflation. However, cash income is best if you’re interested in how people view their own financial situation, since most people don’t include benefits when they think about how well they’re doing. And I happen to think that CPI-U-RS is the best inflation measure we have.

So if you want to know how people view their own financial situation, these charts are a pretty good indicator. Middle-class men of prime working age have been on a slow downward slide for 40 years, and an even steeper slide since 2000—though gaining back a bit over the past five or six years. Middle-class women, by contrast, have been gaining steadily but still make way less than men.

In other words, just about everyone has good cause to be frustrated and unhappy. That’s especially true since the affluent have been doing so well during the same period. Frankly, it’s sort of a miracle that people aren’t more pissed off than they are.

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

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