Chart o’ the Day: The simplest yet most important fact

The naysayers have a point when talking about the unfairness (or incompleteness) of the economic recovery. For many people, there really hasn’t been one yet. For the bottom 80 percent of income earners (almost the whole country) or those without financial assets, it can easily feel like the Recovery Fairy has simply skipped their house.

The irony is that Obama first ran six years ago on the promise that he’d be able to impact this dynamic. Instead, it’s only grown more extreme – and the trend seems to have even accelerated in the last few years.

Neil Irwin makes this point at Upshot:

This is the simplest yet most important fact to understand about the current economic recovery: It has not resulted in higher incomes for anyone other than those who were already doing well. And very large groups of Americans have experienced falling incomes.

Should this trend continue into the next Presidential election cycle, we may be facing one of the ugliest episodes of nationwide class warfare in American history.

Source:

How Are American Families Doing? A Guided Tour of Our Financial Well-Being (Upshot)