… is from page 6 of economists Phil Gramm’s, Robert Ekelund’s, and John Early’s not-to-be-missed 2022 book, The Myth of American Inequality: How Government Biases Policy Debate:
[C]laims that real hourly earnings and real median household income have stagnated in postwar America and that the poverty rate has remained unchanged for fifty years are solely the result of a failure by the statistical agencies of the American government to count most transfer payments as income and to use the most accurate available price indexes to adjust for inflation.
DBx: Pictured here are Phil Gramm, left, and my doctoral-dissertation advisor Bob Ekelund.