"Paul paints a rosy picture but doesn't mention that incomes for lower and middle-class families have fallen since the 80s."
Income in the US has increased for all brackets since 1967[0][1] (at least). The argument is really about who is entitled to more of the increase. But it's framed by the charts as a zero sum: Rich gaining and poor losing. It's not true. All brackets are gaining.
The actual risk is that super-wealthy use their wealth to affect political outcomes. They can influence politics, but were not elected by anyone to do so.
The author is almost certainly referring to real median household income, not personal income, and definitely not average (which is massively impacted by wealth gains at the top). See [1]. It depends which time periods you're comparing, but entire decades saw declines rather than gains. And that's still skewed by the top quartiles. Look at the tables in H2 here [2] to see what's really going on.
Median is the right metric. Household vs. personal, I'm not sure if it matters.
Economic cycles run in decades, hence you need to look at terms longer than decades to see if there is sustained improvement or not. From 1986 to 2019, there was gain at the median. [2; Table H-6] shows that since 1975, the median household income has increased by an annualized 0.7%. Each of the dips in [1] correlates to macro-economic events such as the '89 recession, dot-com/Y2K thing, sub-prime mortgage crisis. When the 2020 number come out, we'll likely see another dip due to COVID.
None of those events were precipitated by wealthy persons somehow screwing the poor. The sub-prime crisis comes the closest, but many wealthy persons were also affected badly by that policy error. The entire workforce of Lehman Brothers, for example.
Income in the US has increased for all brackets since 1967[0][1] (at least). The argument is really about who is entitled to more of the increase. But it's framed by the charts as a zero sum: Rich gaining and poor losing. It's not true. All brackets are gaining.
The actual risk is that super-wealthy use their wealth to affect political outcomes. They can influence politics, but were not elected by anyone to do so.
[0] https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2020/09/1...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_...