The number of people living in poverty dropped by 3.5 million past year, yet 43.1 million Americans remained in poverty.
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The Census Bureau released new numbers on Tuesday showing that real median household incomes rose from $53,718 in 2014 to $56,516 past year.
Despite those overall gains, many areas of the state still saw poverty rates increase. Median family income in 2015 was $72,165, up from $68,504 in 2014.
To put it another way, 2015 may go down as the inflection point when the recovery started to meaningfully filter down to typical American families.
The gains brought median incomes almost back to their levels before the recession, after adjusting for inflation, though they remain below 1999 levels. Real median incomes in 2015 for family households were $72,165 and single-member households at $33,805.
The U.S. Census Bureau released on Wednesday new data from its 2015 nationwide population survey. Almost one in four children – 23 percent – still live in poverty. By 2014, that share had fallen to 49.1 percent. Broward was at 14 percent and Miami-Dade’s rate was 20 percent.
That’s down from 48.8 percent in 2014 but still higher than the 2013 figure, which put child poverty in Brownsville at 45.2 percent.
The continued good news is that the metropolitan area’s poverty rate of 12.3 percent remained well below the nation’s.
The state’s poverty rate was almost the same in 2014 and 2015 at about 16 percent.
The reason for the improvement in household income is tied to higher employment, Census officials said.
“But according to a report from the Federal Reserve Bank of NY, in 2014 and 2015 the growth of middle-income jobs in sectors such as shipping and construction outpaced the gains in lower-paying and higher-paying work”. For blacks the gulf between 2007 and recent years is even wider, at around 5 percent less than that pre-recession high.
The data showed a persistence of wage gaps based on gender and race – and other signs that financial inequality remains a problem in the United States. Women who work full-time now earn about $40,700 annually, compared with $51,200 for men. Women in Odessa earned just 57 percent of what men earned in 2015.
WASHINGTON (AP) – Americans finally got a raise last year after eight years of stagnating incomes.
Vitner said that one of the unfortunate realities of the recovery is that people with lower skill levels have to had a wait longer to see the benefits of an improving economy, but the 2015 data was encouraging.
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The difference in income between men and women also did not change by any statistically significant degree.
