On Tuesday, the Census bureau released its most recent data on income and poverty in the U.S. The report showed that median household income climbed to $56,516, a 5.2 percent increase from 2014 and one of the largest one-year increases ever.
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Low income workers received the largest boost, bringing median income levels back to before the recession.
The data released Tuesday was widely anticipated because evidence from other sources suggested it was likely to show a strong increase in household incomes past year.
The U.S. Census Bureau released various reports about income, poverty and health insurance coverage and they all showed American economy is finally getting over the recession.
Census also reported that the number of people living in poverty fell by 3.5 million from 2014 to 2015.
But as The New York Times’ Nate Cohn points out, rural America didn’t experience the same growth as the rest of the country.
The data was 2.4 per cent lower than the peak level of the median household income of $57,909 in 1999, the bureau said.
The line break around 2013 notes a shift in the Bureau’s income survey questions. And many households that once had middle-class incomes have not recovered since losing work in manufacturing and other higher-paying jobs, with some of them dropping out of the labour force and becoming impoverished. The poverty rate was down by more than a point, as was the percentage of Americans lacking health insurance. This marks the first time since 2007-the year before the Great Recession-that median household income has increased at all. This year, however, all racial groups saw their incomes climb (though the 3.7% increase for Asians was not statistically significant, says the bureau). For Latinos, it fell from 23.6 percent to 21.4 percent, and for female-headed families, the rate fell from 33.1 percent to 30.4 percent. “You combine those things and you get higher household income”, Jones said.
The Census report shows that the increase was driven by the poorest Americans, who saw the largest increase.
The percentage of people without health insurance coverage for the entire 2015 calendar year was 9.1 percent, down from 10.4 percent in 2014.
“The fact that the gains were widespread is also good for housing, but the lack of income growth outside of metro areas raises concerns about the splintering of the housing market between fast-growing urban areas and everywhere else”.
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Income for the poorest 10 percent of households jumped 7.9 percent, while for the wealthiest 10 percent, incomes rose just 2.9 percent. The story of the past few years ― and, really, for most of the last few decades ― has been an economy in which the rich have prospered far more than everybody else.
