Mr. Krugman makes another attempt but again I think the message is lost is a swirl of quintiles and percentiles. A chart like this might work for Mr Krugman's peers and other elite readers of the NYT but its message will never get to the people who really need to understand it, those in the middle quintiles, or really below the 90 percentile. These people need to see DOLLARs. The low information, less educated working class people in these groups don't know which quintile they're in but the do know how much they make, or at least they have a better idea of how much they make. Even better would be to convert the wage level to a per hour wage. That might get their attention. A chart like this might help.
created from data found here [CBO]
If your total family wage is between 8.61 and 14.66 dollars per hour and you work full time, you are in the second quintile.
tnb
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