Ron Johnson thinks that Income Inequality is the American way

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

This graphfrom the OP's link is horrible at demonstrating the point it's trying to make:


It shows that all groups have had rising incomes but it's impossible to eyeball if the relative levels of income for the different groups have changed.

After all, if the lowest quintile in 1967 was making $2,000 and the Top 5% was making $20,000 (10 times as much) while in 2011 it was $20,000 and $180.000 (9 times as much) then income inequality would have decreased over that period.  But those numbers are rough eyeball estimates and likely are off a good bit.

Rather than scaling in dollars, a scale of a percentage of one of the datasets, say the Third Quintile since it's in the middle, would make the data easy to see.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

Thanks.  That definitely shows the change, tho it doesn't look as dramatic as the other graph, which is why I suspect the other was used.  It always peeves me when bad data representation is used to support a point, and it peeves me even more when it wasn't needed as is the case here.

Of course, there's still plenty of other things that could be done to massage the data, such as using a different definition of income, but at least then one is debating what should be measured, not how the resulting data is presented.