Incomes rose at a record pace in 2015 as American workers got a 5.2 percent boost to their paychecks, the first increase in eight years.
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Last week, the Agriculture Department released its annual data on hunger in the United States, showing that food insecurity declined substantially past year for the first time since the recession.
USA median household income rose 5.2% in 2015 to $56,516, but income remains below the 2007 average, the article said. It’s up for nearly every racial group, ‘ except for Asians, she said.
This year’s growth helps counterbalance the unequal growth of the post-recession years, but the wealthy are still capturing a large amount of USA income growth since the recession’s end.
The good news is that the economy is on the right track.
For Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, this will be evidence that Obama’s policies have worked.
Well, it looks like we just did.
Whether or not these statistics filter their way into Americans perception of the economy is a different question, however. The ratio between incomes for households at the 90th percentile and 10th percentile declined past year.
Chris Christopher, head of consumer economics for IHS Global Insight, said he expected incomes to continue to gain ground through 2017 with higher employment and modest inflation. The unemployment rate had declined to 4.9 percent as of last month.
The nation’s poverty rate fell to 13.5 percent in 2015 from 14.8 percent the year earlier, the largest single-year percentage drop since 1968. While there’s still ground to regain, the improvements are a “vindication of the policies of the Obama administration”, he said, adding that the lower poverty rate points to the success of government programs such as Social Security and food stamps. In this group, wages are now increasing at roughly 4 percent year over year. This decrease represents the largest annual percentage point drop in poverty since 1999. According to this metric, 45.7 million people were in poverty in 2015, 2.7 million fewer than in 2014.
The percentage of people in the United States without health insurance fell again in 2015, the U.S. Census Bureau reported.
Analysts cautioned against reading too much into this still-high supplemental poverty rate because it reflects the withdrawal of generous benefits put in place during and immediately after the recession to cushion families. While the increase is positive news, the median household income is still 1.6 percent lower than in 2007, and 2.4 percent lower than its peak in 1999.
In the almost five decades between 1967 and 2015, according to that table, real median household income peaked in 1999 at $57,909. The gains for both genders were the biggest since 2009.
Income inequality has been a major issue throughout the 2016 campaign.
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The bad news, if you want to call it that, is that we’re still lagging behind where most economists and policymakers think we should be.
