>In the US, the purchasing power of that range has dramatically increased over the years. We live in bigger houses, consume better medicine, more food, more education, more and better electronics and entertainment, etc. I think you'll be hard pressed to find a single category in which contemporary Americans have less than 1970's Americans, for any reasonable value of x. If you dispute this, go ahead and find that single category.

This conflates technological and process improvements (e.g. a CPU with 100 times an CPU 's PC power can now be made with 1/1000 of the money) with increases in actual purchasing power.

This also forgets that wealth is relative. A piss-poor Mississippi kid might now have a mobile phone, which in 1980 it would cost tens of thousands of dollars to have (if it was even possible). That doesn't mean the kid is richer than Gordon Gecko, it just means that the scale has changed.

See this for example:

American men in their 30s are earning less than their father's generation did (…) The study was produced by a handful of politically diverse think tanks including the Pew Charitable Trusts, the American Enterprise Institute, the Brookings Institute, the Heritage Foundation and the Urban Institute. It looked at income levels of American men in their 30s, which can be a good indicator of lifetime income. (…) Relying on Census Bureau figures, the study's authors found that after adjusting for inflation, men in their 30s in 2004 had a median income of about $35,000 per year, for a 12 percent drop compared with $40,000 per year for men in the same age group in 1974. (cnn.com)

See here for more: http://www.scribd.com/doc/70425671/Economic-Mobility

>>Only in a bizarro world where the wealth is magically readjusted to account for inequality. In the real world this inequality is caused by wealth moving from the middle to the upper classes.

Are you seriously calling a world of economic growth and technological process "bizarro world"?

No, what I call bizarro world is that place you describe where "inequality is pretty much unrelated to how many people are middle class".

>We have become vastly wealthier than we were at any historical period, ignoring short term fluctuations (e.g., recessions). In the 1970s, the bottom 11% didn't have flush toilets.

Again, conflating technological and manufacturing progress (and cheaper prices for certain products) with wealth.

From Wikipedia: "12.3% fell below the federal poverty threshold and the bottom 20% earned less than $19,178". And this "less than $20K annual", is for household incomes, not personal.

>Hahaha! Now I know you are writing a parody of something - first complaining about inequality, then complaining about wages becoming more equal.

Yes, it must be "hahaha"-level funny for all the families in foreclosures, the homeless, the dying communities with an industry in decline, et al.

And, no, I'm not complaing about "wages becoming more equal", I'm complaining about wages entering a race to the bottom.

If the chinese made $1/hour and US workers made $20/hour, getting the chinese to $2/hour and the US workers to $5/hour is not the kind of equality we were discussing. How about raising Chinese wages WITHOUT fucking the american middle class over (and eventually the Chinese too, as it both caps their salaries and kills their market)?