Saturday, October 20, 2018

Americans flat-lining

The median US household income rose last year to $61,400 – roughly matching what Americans were making before the great recession. The median income went up by 1.8% from 2016.
The real median earnings of people working full-time and year-round actually fell by 1.1%, to $52,146 for men and $41,977 for women.
For some of the poorest Americans, those at the 10th percentile, incomes stayed flat. 
“Today’s data shows a marked slowdown in the pace of improvement relative to the previous two years. While any reduction in poverty or increase in income is a step in right direction, most families have just barely made up the ground lost over the past decade,” said Elise Gould, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute. “Well-worn patterns of inequality reemerged, with stronger growth at the top than for typical households.”
Last year’s median income of $61,400 was up from $60,300 in 2016 and is the highest level ever recorded. However, because of changes in the way incomes are measured, officials say incomes are about equal with what they were in 2007, before the financial crisis.
“It’s statistically tied with 1999 and 2007,” Trudi Renwick, an assistant division chief at Census Bureau, told reporters.
39.7 million people were living in poverty last year – a number that did not change significantly from the year before. A family with two adults and two children is counted as living below the poverty line if they make less than $24,800 in a year.
 8.8% of Americans, or 28.5 million people, went without health insurance for all of 2017. That was virtually unchanged from 2016, staying flat after years of declines in the uninsured rate following the passage of the Affordable Care Act.

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