I've been staring at a lot of these kinds of graphs for years. Most of them show gains in middle class income in the late 90s, which means that the statement "t

I've been staring at a lot of these kinds of graphs for years. Most of them show gains in middle class income in the late 90s, which means that the statement "the middle class hasn't gotten a raise in 15 years" is accurate. Yet when you zoom way out nearly everything I've seen shows the decoupling starting around 1970 or shortly thereafter. It simply experienced a blip in the opposite direction from roughly '95 to 2000 and then the trend both resumed and accelerated. In stock trading they say "nothing goes straight up and nothing goes straight down," but the overall trend is what's important.