1. Short title This Act may be cited as the Measuring Real Income Growth Act of 2018 . 2. Findings Congress finds the following: (1) Economic inequality in the United States has increased dramatically during the 4 decades preceding the date of enactment of this Act, with fewer households taking home a larger share of the national income. (2) While growth was once distributed relatively evenly across all individuals in the United States, research shows that economic gains are increasingly enjoyed by the most affluent. By contrast, the majority of individuals in the United States have seen income and wage growth significantly below what is suggested by national measures of output and income. (3) The Bureau of Economic Analysis of the Department of Commerce (referred to in this section as BEA ) reports annual and quarterly estimates of gross domestic product (referred to in this section as GDP ) in the United States. These estimates are important measures of the overall size and health of the economy of the United States but do not describe how economic gains are distributed across the population of the United States. (4) In a country of 325,000,000 individuals, top-line GDP numbers do not capture the full range of household economic experiences and may be misleading. The real GDP grew more than 3 percent annually between 2003 and 2005, but the average income for 1/2 of all individuals in the United States fell during that period. (5) Disaggregating economic growth by income groups will provide a more complete picture of how families in the United States are faring across all rungs of the economic ladder and whether economic growth is benefiting all individuals in the United States. (6) Recent academic estimates of distributional growth show how much of the economic gains during the 40 years preceding the date of enactment of this Act have accrued to the top of the income distribution. Between 1980 and 2014, the average income of the top 1 percent of the income distribution grew 5 times as much as the average