The New York Times just conceded something amazing about free-market capitalism

The modern Democratic message seems to be that all those economic gains in the 1980s and 1990s that (easily) led to two-terms each for Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton were illusory. Didn’t happen, at least not for middle-class America. As President Obama said back in 2013, ” …  over the last few decades, the rungs on the ladder of opportunity have grown farther and farther apart, and the middle class has shrunk.”

But what do I see in the New York Times today? Well, the Paper of Record tells me that since the 1960s, the middle class – defined as households earning between $35,000 and $100,000 — has been shrinking. Guess, the Obamacrats are right. Wait … the nature of that decline has changed of late, however:

Few people noticed or cared as the size of that group began to fall, because the shift was primarily caused by more Americans climbing the economic ladder into upper-income brackets. But since 2000, the middle-class share of households has continued to narrow, the main reason being that more people have fallen to the bottom. At the same time, fewer of those in this group fit the traditional image of a married couple with children at home, a gap increasingly filled by the elderly.

Listen, I am pretty sure this is not the message — that the middle-class has been disappearing because it has been getting richer — I have been hearing from the mainstream media or Democrats for the past 30 years. I thought all that deregulation and deunionization and free trading and tax cutting had hollowed out the middle-class since the mid-1970s? Weird. Anyway, the middle-class stagnation and struggle of today is serious and worth noting, as I have written. And here is AEI’s Mike Strain in that Times piece:

“In the Great Recession, we lost a lot of middle-income jobs and we gained a lot of low-paying jobs,” said Michael R. Strain, resident scholar at the right-of-center American Enterprise Institute. “That’s a slower-burning thing, but it increased in ferocity during the recession, and people are feeling it.”

I guess the facts have finally caught up to the left’s insight.