If you want to understand why Trump won the recent US presidential election, you can't overlook the economic data.  If you do, his victory may look mighty confusing, alarming even.  But once you understand the degree to which the average US family and the entire Gen-X and Millennial generations are being completely hosed economically, everything starts to take shape.

As most struggling Americans can tell you, real household income has gone nowhere for more than 20 years:

This multi-decade burden of "running ever faster just to stay in the same place" is what led many US voters to reject Hillary Clinton, the establishment candidate, and instead roll the dice on the iconoclast promising to upend the system.

But if Trump's plan to "make America great again" means a return to the 1980s and 1990s when median real incomes climbed smartly, he's not going to be able to pull that rabbit out of the hat, I'm afraid.  None of the conditions in place then are with us today including cheap, abundant energy (remember, oil was $10 a barrel in 1998); not to mention that we were riding the tailwinds produced by all of the gains from the early, explosive stage of the technology and internet revolutions.