Koala, I don't know what is your day job but my suggestion is that you keep it.

You get into deep waters and it shows. The answer to your question is that you ignore income distribution. Averages my friend are usually deceiving. If I will place half of you in refregirator and half in an oven on the average you will feel fine. This is what your calculations show. Please bear with me. What follows is part of an article that I wrote on the subject several years ago. On August 23 2011 the labor department published the new data on the subject of income dostribution but I have not read it yet. But I know things are worst.

"To put the whole thing in perspective, according to a new study by professors Thomas Pikerty and Emmanuel Saez of the French Research Institute Cepremap and Harvard, respectively, over the past 29 years from 1970 to 1998 the average pretax income in 1998 dollars increased from $33,637 to $38,739. The corresponding wage incomes, as I mentioned earlier, amounted to $ 29,046 and $31,422 respectively. It is interesting to note that these numbers are upwards biased because the averages are defined over all incomes, which include the income of the super rich. Now lets us see what occurred to the income of the upper 10% of the population. As a whole, in 1970, the 90-100% bracket received 31.51% of the total income of the country. In 1998, the 90-100% group enjoyed 41.44% of the total income. In other words, the share of the upper 10% of the population increased by 32% over twenty-nine years, or 1% per year. In 1998, this population bracket included 13.1 million tax units or households. To put it differently, approximately 10% of the population in 1998 enjoyed 41.44% of the income, and 90% of the population received 58.56%. Notice that the numbers of the upper 10% of the population do not include any capital gains or stock options, which are a major part of the income when they are exercised. Notice also, that this increase in the share of the upper 10% income class comes by necessity at the expense of all other classes, since the sum of all percentages has to be equal to 100 percent.

One may argue that the increase in question is not really that large. Well, this might be so, but the real story is not in the whole decile, that is, the 10% of the population, but in its structure. In particular, the bracket of 90-95% of the population with an average income of $94,000 experienced an increase in its share from 11.13% in 1970 to 12.02% in 1998; that is, an increase of 8% in 29 years. In 1998, this bracket had 6.55 million tax units. The share of 95 -99% of the population faired a bit better. It increased from 12.58% to 14.83%; that is an increase of 17.9% during the period in question. T his bracket is characterized by an average income of $143,000 and consisted of 5.24 million tax units. The share of 99-100% increased from 7.80% to 14.58%. This reflects an increase of 90.1%. This bracket included 1.3 million tax units in 1998 and the average income was $564,901. Again, the share of 99.5- 100%; that is, the share of one-half of 1% went from 5.16% to 11.14%. This is an increase of 116%. This population bracket included 655,000 tax units with an average income of $862,800. The share of the 99.9 -100% bracket, that is the highest one-tenth of 1%, increased from 1.94% in 1970 to 6.04% in 1998. This amounts to a 311% increase in the share of one-tenth of 1% of the population and the number of tax units was 131,000. The average income of this class was $2.34 million. The last bracket is 99.99 – 100%; that is, the one-hundredth of 1% of the population. Here, we find the really super-rich of our society all the way up to Warren Buffet and Bill Gates. In this bracket, there are 13,100 tax units with an average income of $9.97 million per year. Their percent in total income during this period increased from .53% to 2.57%. In other words, this population bracket experienced a 485% increase in their share. What these numbers show is that the action really is not at the middle or upper middle class of incomes, but rather at the upper 1% of the population."

As you can see what you did was plain sophomoric. What you should be complainig is what happens to the American worker. Ever since things have gone seriously south.