“[The Great Recession put us] in a deep hole, and this one year nearly single handedly got us out of the hole”, said economist Lawrence Mishel of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute.
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The median household income rose in real terms by 5.2% to $56,516 in 2015, up from the 2014 median of $53,718 (the green line on the chart).
That is a shift that could have important implications for US consumer spending, and for retailers and other consumer-facing businesses. Households at the bottom 10 percent of the economic ladder saw a 7.8 percent increase in income past year, while the top 10 percent in income had a 2.9 percent gain.
Median income means that half the population earns more and half earns less, Zweig said.
Income stagnation had become a hallmark of the post-recession years, hobbling families who were facing higher expenses for everything from education to housing while their earnings went sideways.
The report also considered races and each race had different increments. While median income remained below where it stood prior to the recession, the Census Bureau data suggested the tide was turning. The first one is Asians.
Latino households recorded the biggest increase, up 6.1 percent, followed by a 4.4 percent gain for whites and 4.1 percent for blacks.
Chairperson of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, Jason Furman, said the reports data exceeds the strong expectation he had.
The census report also showed that the number of uninsured Americans continued to drop, as people take advantage of Obama’s health care law. He said everything you look in the report is what you would want to see or better.
House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady, (R-Tex) said in a statement that the recently published reports are another disappointing confirmation that too many American are still struggling to provide for their families and reach their full potential.
“I’m certainly more optimistic than I’ve been in a long time”, he said of the broad-based gains in income and poverty measures.
The Census Bureau said that comparing changes in household income at selected percentiles shows that income inequality has increased from 1999 (the year that household income peaked before the 2001 recession) to 2015.
With many more Americans signing up for private insurance through new marketplaces created by Obamacare, the number of people who were uninsured for part or all of a year ago came down to 29 million, from 33 million without medical coverage in 2014.
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 the poverty rate has improved, it’s still higher than it was in 2000. Families with a female householder and “no husband present” had a median income of $34,126. Families with a male householder did not experience any positive decreased.
While there was no significant improvement in USA income inequality, the share of the public living without health insurance fell from 10.4 per cent to 9.1 per cent, or 29 million people, in 2015.
Enrollment through the state exchange increased in all areas, with 2.8 million people signing up for coverage through the end of 2016, the state Department of Health said Tuesday.
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Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Mayor Bill de Blasio, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie pay their respects during the 9/11 anniversary service at Ground Zero.
