Since then, we have had 10 straight years without that level of growth despite the fact that the last recession ended in June 2009.
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Median household incomes just surged for the first time since 2007, according to the latest US Census report on income and poverty in the US. This marks the first time since 2007-the year before the Great Recession-that median household income has increased at all.
In the almost five decades between 1967 and 2015, according to that table, real median household income peaked in 1999 at $57,909. The median is the middle point in which half of households would make more money, while half would fall below that point.
Average American incomes rose by 5.2% in 2015, in the fastest increase ever recorded by the federal government.
Women working full-time made about 80 cents for every dollar that men made a year ago, according to data released Tuesday by the Census Bureau.
A second report also indicated that the percentage of people without health insurance also decreased by 1.3 percentage points between 2014 and 2015, meaning 90.9 percent of the population had health insurance for all or part of the year. The poverty rates for people aged 65 and older also decreased, falling 1.1 percentage points, from 10.0 percent to 8.8 percent.
Since the financial crisis of 2008, the number of people living in poverty in the United States has increased by more than 3.3 million.
“The income gains and drop in poverty reflect ongoing gains in the job market, Renwick said”. Furthermore, middle class Americans have struggled to see their standard of living rise over the past generation, as the increased integration of the global economy has grown the incomes of the very rich and very poor around the world, but done much less for those in the middle classes. Because of margins of error in the data, the bureau said those earlier gains were not statistically different from the rise reported Tuesday.
The largest increases in incomes were for households in the bottom fifth of all earners, while incomes declined slightly for households in the top fifth.
The U.S. Census Bureau on Tuesday released its annual report on income, poverty and health insurance.
“Poverty dropped for whites, blacks and Hispanics, as well as for children and seniors”, Pam reports.
The reason for the improvement in household income is tied to higher employment, Census officials said.
In 2015, those living in poverty were 5.4 percent of married-couple families, 28.2 percent of families with a female householder and 14.9 percent of families with a male householder. The number of full-time workers was up 2.5 million nationally.
The report, Income and Poverty in the United States: 2015, is evidence of a long-awaited economic recovery.
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Overall, about 94.7 percent of all La Crosse County residents had health insurance, about the same rate as in 2014.
