I had to look back at the graph after the explanations so here's the shortest version

• "politicians say it's good you've gone from the left line to the right line - an increase in nearly $1000 on average"

• "they ignore line 2 in the middle which shows that people went up more than twice as much before coming down again to nearly where they were before"

• so while it's true to say there's been an increase, it's equally true to say there has been a massive decrease too.

• people who actually have to live like this won't find it helpful to make a comparison to when they had slightly less money when there was a more recent time that they had a lot more money