In this book, we will show how claims that real hourly earnings and real median household income have stagnated in postwar America and that the poverty rate has remained unchanged for fifty years are solely the result of a failure by the statistical agencies of the American government to count most transfer payments as income and to use the most accurate available price indexes to adjust for inflation. Every significant measure of economic well-being expressed in terms of dollars is higher than the official measure shown in government statistics.
