The Middle-Class Recovery Plan
Middle-Class Historical Timeline
"America Then and Now": a real historical timeline of middle-class economic conditions — income, wages, employment, inflation, housing, healthcare, education, retirement security, wealth distribution, and federal debt. Now includes a seed dataset of four real series. See the full methodology.
What this is not. This is not a live BLS/Census/CBO feed — it is a small,
manually researched and individually sourced seed dataset (four of twelve measure categories),
current only as of each series' own "last verified" date. Every data point carries a fixed
"context, not causation" marker — see below — and administration context, where shown, is never
an implied cause of an indicator's movement.
Context, never causation
Verified seed dataset — four real series
Real median household income, the unemployment rate, the labor force participation rate, and CPI-U inflation, 2019 through 2024 (or the latest year with a confirmed figure). A defensible starting core, not every category — see the methodology for what remains architecture-only and why.