A U.S. Census Bureau report released Tuesday showed that median household income in 2015 jumped 5.2 percent from a year earlier, after adjusting for inflation, according to CNN Money.
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The survey said median household income in Allegheny County (the income at which half the households were above and half were below) was $54,467 in 2015, up 3.8 percent.
The government’s annual report on incomes and poverty portrayed an economy that started to benefit a wider range of Americans, roughly a decade after the 2007-09 US recession. However, the local poverty rate is inflated by a large student population.
But income of the typical USA home still remained below that of 2007, the year before the most recent recession, when median household income was $57,423.
The gains were spread broadly, with almost all age groups, household types, regions and racial or ethnic groups seeing increases. Households in the middle 60 percent experienced 4.8 percent annual growth, while incomes for the top 20 percent rose by 4.2 percent since 2014.
For Donald Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, the new data weakens a crucial talking point. Bernie Sanders, an independent who campaigned for the Democratic nomination.
For the first time, median incomes are higher than when President Barack Obama took office, the AP reported, but still fall short of the $57,909 median income in 1999. According to the Bureau’s report, the official poverty rate in 2015 was 13.5%, down from 14.8% in 2014. It was a “broad, broad increase in household incomes”, Trudi J. Renwick, assistant division chief for the bureau’s economic characteristics, said in a press call about the findings. And by gender, overall, men working full-time made more than women, but women saw a slightly larger increase in 2015. Numerous jobs created in the early years of the recovery have been in low-paying sectors, such as fast food restaurants and retail.
“For low-income families that we work with”, said Babcock, “their own earnings are not going up fast enough to make headway in that 97 hours a week they have to work to pay the rent on an apartment”.
Americans at all levels of the income ladder saw their financial lives improve past year. The top 5 percent of all earners recorded income of $214,500 a year ago, compared with $117,500 in 1967, adjusted for inflation. That narrowed the gap between the two groups by one of the largest amounts on record.
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“I usually try to be restrained”, Furman tweeted, “but this is unambiguously the best Income, Poverty & Health Insurance report ever”.
