Many of thousands of charts floating around illuminate some aspect of the economy, but these four tell the primary story:

1. The gains from rising productivity–the only durable source of prosperity–were shifted from wages to owners of capital.
2. As wages lost ground, the central bank (Federal Reserve) replaced cash earnings with debt, by
   • a) lowering interest rates for 40 years,
   • b) increasing the money supply and
   • c) opening the floodgates of credit.
3. Wage earners used credit to pay expenses, the wealthy used credit to buy income-producingassets.
4. As a result, assets such as houses are now unaffordable to all but the wealthy.

The net result of these dynamics is the rich got much, much richer, and wage earners became debt-serfs paying interest to the wealthy owners of their debts.

So the wealthy tapped the expanding pool of “money” and credit to buy income-producing assets: stocks, real estate, enterprises, etc. Given the limited quantity of real-world assets that generate income, this relentless credit-fueled demand from the wealthy pushed the valuations of assets higher, rendering them less affordable to wage earners. This massive, sustained transfer of wealth via credit expansion has been going on so long that it’s now normalized: very few people can recall an economy that shared the gains with wage earners rather than diverting most of the nation’s wealth to the already-wealthy.

Most people today were not alive when most families were able to do more than just “get by” on one income.