A stunning piece of reporting from the New York Times... it seems to have fit some truth into the news it deems fit to print. Could this be another sign of the rats leaving the ship. quote from that article... Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody's Analytics, sent us his own quarterly calculations based on this source: President Obama took office in the first quarter of 2009, when median household income was $54,797.63. As of the last quarter of 2011, median household income was $52,377.21. This was the interval Mr. Zandi suggested using to check Mr. Romney's statement, and it shows an income drop of $2,420.42. That's not $3,000, of course, but it's still pretty bad. One could also reasonably argue that it might be more appropriate to use the quarter before Mr. Obama took office as the baseline, rather than the quarter in which he was sworn in. In the fourth quarter of 2008, median household income was about $55,380.17. Starting from that quarter gives us a decline of $3,002.96, almost exactly the number Mr. Romney cited.