“You’re working harder, but your paycheck isn’t going up.” So claims a widely shared chart from the Hillary Clinton campaign, which shows the pay of American workers lagging far behind productivity growth after the 1970s. The idea that rising inequality has cheated most Americans out of wage gains has become the cornerstone of the liberal narrative about today’s economy. It is a vivid example of the kind of start-with-the-conclusion reasoning that Brookings Institution scholar Richard Reeves has dubbed “policy-based evidence-making.”

No one supplies liberal-friendly evidence-making as well as the Economic Policy Institute, whose researchers originated Clinton’s chart of doom. Just one problem — the chart does not show that workers’ pay has failed to keep up with their value to employers.