Foo - Question about economics.

Where can I find the inflation-adjusted (consistently I hope) average income of some percentage of the US population over the last half century? Like the average inflation-adjusted income of the poorest 80%?

It will probably be found under the "There are lies, There are damned lies and then there are statistics."

Try looking up census records.

Try this website: www.rfe.org (resources for economists) The book 'Economics' by Samuelson ans Nordhaus comes with a graph with the evolution of income in the US but only for minimum wage workers. For average income, try another source, maybe the US Central bank data.

Ricardo

Awesome, found what I wanted in black and white, thanks USAZorro & Ricardo! Evidently, the average income in the US has increased fairly linearly (http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/histinc/p01ar.html) over the past few decades, but the average income for the full time yearly worker (http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/histinc/p36ar.html) has pretty much stayed the same since the early 70's. God bless capitalism!

Whoops, that was the mean. Anyway, the census lists the sum of our per capita income as ~7 trillion, but the gdp is ~11 trillion, any idea where the difference comes from?

net taxes? ... i'm just shooting off here... lol

What? They're taxing nets these days? The bastards.

Ah, yup, the US government's revenue was ~2 trillion, although there's still quite a bit unaccounted for. Would this represent the efficiency of our economy? I suppose we could all tear down and rebuild our houses to drive up the GDP w/o doing anything useful...

no need for that i suppose, the war on terror in itself is generating quite a bit of GDP output..

Who says it's not a great idea to send our military in to police a destabilized region? I mean, we've quadrupled the price of a barrel of oil, talk about a cash cow. Not to mention defense contractors w/o accountability...
http://www.vortexmediagroup.com/images/banghead.gif

yeah, Halliburton made out like a bandit along with all the oil companies. There's also about $2bil the GAO says is unaccounted for as well. Don't you just love capitalism? I'm gonna start an oil business!

There's also a substantial amount probably well into the billions that doesnt show up, the underground economy :)

The information is in the Economic Report to the President, it's published each year, and al tables and charts are on this website http://www.gpoaccess.gov/eop/download.html