According to the Wall Street Journal, it is “a canard” to claim that “workers are doing far more poorly than they did” in the 1990s expansion:

The latest reports on wages and income have been rolling in, and with them we can discount one more canard about the current economic expansion–namely, that wages are stagnant and workers are doing far more poorly than they did in that second Age of Pericles known as the 1990s.

Over the past year, the real average wage for non-supervisory employees has risen 2.8%. That equates to about a $1,200 increase in purchasing power for the typical household this year. Last year, real median household income was also up 1.1% after inflation. This rise in take-home pay helps to explain how Americans have had the disposable income this Christmas shopping season to pay $600 for PlayStation 3 computer games and $150 for the Kid-Tough Digital Camera for three-year-olds.

It is true that income and wages are still about 2% below the peak they hit in 2000 before the dot-com bust and recession. But a new Treasury Department analysis finds that, measuring from the start of the peak of each expansion, wages so far in this decade’s cycle are running ahead of the recovery pace during the 1990s. Thus the “stagnant wages” story can join the “jobless recovery,” the “outsourcing” crisis and the runaway budget deficit as other tales of woe that have all turned out to be evanescent.

But as the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities points out in this table, median income growth during the recovery has been poor:

Here’s how CBPP summarizes the 2005 income data:

Overall median household income rose modestly in 2005 — but significantly less than normal for a year during an economic recovery — while the poverty rate remained unchanged, also an unusual development for a recovery year. For the first time on record, poverty was higher in the fourth year of an economic recovery, and median income no better, than when the last recession hit bottom and the recovery began.

In addition, the 1.1 percent increase in median income that occurred in 2005 was driven by a rise in income among elderly households. Median income for non-elderly households (those headed by someone under 65) fell again in 2005, declining by $275, or 0.5 percent. Median income for non-elderly households declined for the fifth consecutive year and was $2,000 (or 3.7 percent) lower in 2005 than in the recession year of 2001.

Furthermore, the poverty rate, at 12.6 percent, remained well above its 11.7 percent rate in 2001, while overall median household income was $243 lower in 2005 than in 2001 (not a statistically significant difference).

Postscript for WSJ editors: No one is spending $600 on Playstation 3 “computer games.” The PS3 is considered a console, not a computer, and people are spending $600 (or more) to buy the system, not the games, which generally cost $50-$60.