Talk about just-in-time: If President Barack Obama focuses some of tonight's State of the Union address on income inequality and the opportunity gap (as the Bloomberg View editors urge), the issue's leading data-cruncher has newfigures and analysis to buttress any initiatives.
Emmanuel Saez, an economics professor at the University of California at Berkeley, calculates that, during the 2007 to 2009 recession, average income per family declined dramatically by 17 percent, the largest two-year drop since the Great Depression.