The illusion of income stagnation comes from the fact that two people in a household today earn not much more than three people earned a generation ago. That is still a hefty 50 percent rise in real per capita income -- which may be why more people can now afford to go live in their own households.
Playing games with household income statistics enables the political left to keep hyping poverty, even as genuine poverty is declining to a point that would endanger the political agenda of the left, if the public understood.
When all else fails, liberals and leftists can fall back on "racism" as the all-purpose explanation for all black-white differences in income, education and other social factors. Even here, however, their task is no longer as easy as it once was. Rising rates of intermarriage and the widespread popularity of black and other minority public figures like Oprah, Colin Powell and Tiger Woods makes it hard to keep pretending that things are still the way they were back in the days of the Selma marches and the Birmingham bombings.
It is even tougher when you take a hard, close look at the statistics. QueryLogic Corporation in California has organized vast amounts of data from the 1990 Census on CD-ROMs, and from it you can tabulate the incomes of people with a wide variety of ancestries. It turns out that people from Barbados living in the United States -- almost all being black -- have higher incomes than white Americans.
More than one-fifth of all Asian American families have incomes of $100,000 or more. What does that do to the all-purpose explanation of racism? What does it do to the claim that only whites have a chance in the American economy?
No wonder the Census, the media and academics tiptoe around certain statistics. A whole political vision could collapse if the facts become widely known.