Frankly, most of the economic charts produced by the government do this kind of thing.
Most of the time the rich use this data to tell you how well things are going, when what they really mean is how well it's going for them.
It's an aggregate measure, so that the vast sums earned by the rich distort higher what's actually happening to the majority.
In the as-reported numbers at the time, everything actually went sideways for a time during the Great Recession and personal income actually fell, except that even that decline disappeared as the revisions to the data came in. The rich still made money in the Great Recession, enough to lift this aggregate measure ever higher right through the recession even as banks failed by the hundreds and millions lost their jobs and homes.
But the rich use this particular data set right now to tell you things like "you don't know how to shop" and "groceries have never been cheaper", you ignoramus.
They controlled roughly 60% of all income from 2020 to mid-2025, and the top 20% by wealth held nearly 72% of total household wealth as of Q4 2025.
The top 20% received roughly $14 trillion of the $23 trillion in this chart in March 2026, leaving the remaining $9 trillion, 40%, to be split by the 80%, the rest of us, however we must.
Rising prices of anything will naturally impact the 20% far less than the 80%.
It's another "let them eat cake" moment.
