Originally Posted by Jack Shafer

So when I spotted yesterday's (Sept. 20) 4,500-word, Page One story in the Washington Post, "As Income Gap Widens, Uncertainty Spreads: More U.S. Families Struggle to Stay on Track," by Griff Witte, I assumed that if I dug deep enough, I'd find a happy story untold. And I was right.

The piece, the first of a series in coming months, posits a "changing of the rules for a crucial part of the middle class." It's a change for the worse, of course, as good-paying jobs vanish to foreign countries and vaporize a portion of middle-class America in the process.

Witte concedes, however, that the middle class as a group is earning more than it ever has before harvesting the bad news: "But when compared with those at the top, the middle has lost much ground. And many in the middle have dropped well behind their peers," he writes, as he sketches depressing profiles of several fallen wage-earners.

But EconLog seizes on a big, colorful chart in the Post story to discover the missing good news. Yes, the number of middle-income households* ($35,000 to $50,000, measured in 2003 dollars) in America fell from 22.3 percent to 15 percent between 1967 and 2003. But the two categories below the middle ($15,000 to $35,000, and under $15,000) declined, too, from 52.8 percent of households to 40.9 percent of households.

Where have the vanishing middle, the lower middle, and the poor gone? At the risk of sounding like the Wall Street Journal editorial page singing from a Curtis Mayfield songbook, they're moving on up! EconLog notes that if the middle-income household is being squeezed out, it's being squeezed into the higher-income categories. He writes, "the percentage of households with incomes over $50,000 has climbed from 24.9 percent in 1967 to 44.1 percent in 2003."

Where's the crisis? If author Witte could wave a magic wand, would he return income distribution to where it was in 1967, when 52.8 percent made less than $35,000, compared to 40.9 percent today?