Stagnant Incomes?

It is an oft-repeated liberal talking point, one that President Obama himself used in his populist Osawatomie Speech: The rich got richer the past 30 years while the middle-class went nowhere. In short, the past few decades of lower taxes and lighter regulation have been a failure. Or, rather, pro-market policies have been a failure … except that new research from the University of Chicago’s Bruce Meyer and Notre Dame’s James Sullivan find that “median income and consumption both rose by more than 50 percent in real terms between 1980 and 2009.”