The Obvious Reason for the Decline In Median Income

Real Clear Politics reports:

before we go inventing new economic theories about how extreme income inequality must be hurting the middle class (we have no such theory today, only the hypothesizing of certain people), perhaps we should start with simple explanations. Incomes are a function of two variables: hours worked and earnings per hour.

Middle class incomes are not growing as fast as most people would like because middle class families are working fewer hours. Possible policy prescriptions could include pro-business moves to increase hiring or pro-work moves such as making the social safety net somewhat less comfortable than it has become over the past five to ten years. Either way, it seems clear that the major problem restricting faster growth in household incomes is not income inequality, nor corporate greed, but a basic lack of people working. Let's work on that before we start on the complicated stuff.

Check out the graphs in this one.