Once upon a time, back in the middle of the 20th century, relatively few Americans spent much time worrying about the wealth and power of our nation’s richest. That wealth and power, most Americans felt, had shrunk significantly since the heyday of the “Robber Barons” a half-century earlier. By the 1950s, the United States had essentially become the world’s first mass middle-class society.

One telling sign of those times: Throughout the heart of that postwar era, America’s wealthiest faced a 91 percent federal tax on their top-bracket income — and the Republican president during most of that time, Dwight Eisenhower, made no move whatsoever to trim that top rate down.

But the richest then among us never accepted that state of affairs. They busied themselves doing their best to undo the tax rates and other government policies that made for a more economically equal America. And their best would turn out to prove plenty good enough: Our richest 1 percent currently hold a national wealth share that rivals our plutocratic high-water of a century ago.

So points out the progressive economist take on our past half-century’s economic history, a take widely accepted within the larger economics community. But this take has now come under a fierce, in-your-face challenge from a pair of economists who contend that today’s richest are not grabbing an appreciably larger share of the nation’s income than their counterparts back when America liked Ike.

Any significant pre-tax gains in that share, the two economists insist, have simply ended up evaporating at tax time.

These two contrarian analysts, the U.S. Treasury Department’s Gerald Auten and David Splinter at the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation, have been making quite a media splash. Journalists at prestigious outlets like the Economist, Bloomberg, and the Financial Times have breathlessly highlighted their attack on what has become the conventional wisdom about growing U.S. inequality.

Has that wisdom survived this latest assault? Two new appraisals of the Auten and Splinter case offer a clear answer.

One of these appraisals comes from the economist Austin Clemens, a senior fellow at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. A new assessment by Clemens dives deeply into our national income data and concludes rather convincingly that the Auten-Splinter analysis “doesn’t overturn” the ongoing “consensus on rising U.S. income inequality.”

That consensus rests heavily on the landmark research of Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics and the University of California-Berkeley’s Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman. Clemens subjects that research — and the Austen-Splinter assault on it — to a detailed scrutiny, examining both the assumptions the conflicting analyst teams make and the data they crunch.

Some of this comparative scrutiny can get challenging for those of us who don’t plow the academic economic fields on an ongoing basis. But Clemens does an engaging job of explaining all the data complexities — and bringing before us contrasts that make the debate easier to fathom.

One such contrast: how the debaters treat income “either incorrectly reported to the IRS” or income “not reported to the IRS at all, likely for the purpose of evading taxes.” This income, Clemens points out, “remains the single largest difference” between the plutocratic top 1 percent income share that the Piketty team sees and the far more modest share that Austen and Splinter celebrate.

The latest available research on “offshore income and income sheltered through complicated partnership arrangements,” Clemens notes, backs the Piketty team take. “Underreported income,” this research shows, has become “more concentrated at the top than standard IRS audits suggest.” Those standard audits, IRS analyst John Guyton and other researchers have found, tend to “significantly understate the amount of evasion at the top of the income distribution.”

The most potent point, overall, against the Auten-Splinter no-reason-to-worry-about-income-inequality thesis? That may well be the simplest point for average Americans to understand: If income in the United States isn’t concentrating at the top, as Auten and Splinter insist, then how can the wealth gap between our richest and the rest of us be getting ever so stunningly wider?

Clemens puts the matter a bit more delicately: “Auten and Splinter’s results run counter to the signals from the distribution of U.S. wealth, which has become significantly more concentrated at the top.”

Other analysts of the Auten-Splinter case against growing income inequality — like the Economic Policy Institute’s Elise Gould and Josh Bivens — have been more blunt. To determine whether the United States has become a great deal more unequal or just a little, Gould and Bivens don’t see any need to enter into debates about arcane stats that leave most Americans scratching their heads.

Gould and Bivens ask us instead to look at what individual Americans are actually earning “in the labor market,” a data set “that sidesteps nearly all” the complexities that can so bewilder almost everyone outside the narrow confines of the economics profession.

In the middle decades of the 20th century, Gould and Bivens note, labor market data show clearly that worker hourly pay neatly tracked the American economy’s growth in productivity. But then, around 1980, that linkage broke down. Worker wage gains began no longer keeping pace with gains in the productivity of the U.S. economy. This worker “missing pay” was essentially going instead to business owners and their top-paid hired hands.

The best place to see this dynamic statistically up close? That may be the Social Security Administration’s annual data reports on how much Americans are making. These Social Security analyses, Gould and Bivens relate, demonstrate “how vastly unequal” earnings growth in the United States has been “between 1979 and 2022.”

Over the course of those years, inflation-adjusted annual earnings for America’s top 1 percent leaped by 171.7 percent. The jump for the top 0.1 percent doubled that advance, rising an astounding 344.4 percent after taking inflation into account. Meanwhile, down in the bottom 90 percent, earnings over those four-plus decades grew a mere 32.9 percent.

Need some more evidence of how strikingly wide income inequality in the United States has ballooned? Just ponder, Gould and Bivens suggest, the paychecks of the corporate CEOs who sit at the top of our national compensation pyramid. Chief execs at America’s top 350 publicly traded firms averaged 21 times typical American worker pay back in 1965. In 2022, these execs averaged 344 times typical worker pay.

EPI’s Gould and Bivens view the furor over the claims that Auten and Splinter have advanced as a “real step backwards” in understanding the maldistribution of America’s income. Our “real debate,” they posit, ought to remain why we’re seeing this maldistribution —  and what we can do about it.