The official poverty rate decreased by 1.2 percentage points between 2014 and 2015, and the number of US citizens living in poverty fell by 3.5 million between 2014 and 2015, the largest annual percentage point drop since 1999, officials said.
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“We lifted three and a half million people out of poverty, the largest one-year drop in poverty since 1968”, President Barack Obama said during a rally in Philadelphia for Hillary Clinton. Incomes increased for every age group, with the strongest gains for households with adults in prime working years.
The number of people with health insurance also rose.
The survey data for the Island, for the most part, did not mirror the year-to-year change in national data that the bureau released Tuesday, which gave statistics from 2014 to 2015 in income, poverty and health insurance.
In 2015, the median household earned $56,500, adjusted for inflation, according to the US Census Bureau (pdf).
The median household income for a family in America surged last year, the first time since before the Great Recession when there was a year-over-year increase in earnings. 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.
Last year, 43.1 million people were in poverty, 3.5 million fewer than in 2014. Incomes also increased for immigrants as well as women and men that work full-time. My forecast was based on reports from employers about their inability to find qualified workers, job vacancies taking longer to fill, and other metrics that seemed likely to lead to bidding up workers’ wages.
Almost all age groups, household types, regions, and racial groups experienced income gains with one glaring exception: Incomes did not rise for households outside of metro areas.
A look further back in time shows that local income growth outpaces the country’s. The income increase, coupled with a noteworthy reduction in the poverty rate, shows a turning point in the American economy’s post-recession recovery.
“The last of couple years have been really good in Florida”, he said. But it did move slightly, from 79 cents on the dollar to 80 cents on the dollar.
Reporting from the Associated Press was used in this story.
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In a statement issued by the White House, Mr Furman also said the pay gap between men and women working full-time shrank previous year.
