The NYT’s Economix blog comes through with another excellent look at income in the US. Most immediate to me was the stall hit right around the 2000 tech bubble. While the overall economy recovered, it seems that real income stagnated for all income levels. This held until the 2008 financial crisis, where high income earners began separating from everyone else (due to the rapid income declines of middle and low income folks). This chart is a visual depiction of the slow death of America’s famed middle class.

A little more context to the chart:

The figure below plots the real incomes of low-, middle-, and high-income households, corresponding to the 20th, 50th (median) and 95th percentiles of household income (the 20th percentile was about $21,000 last year; the 95th was about $191,000).