A Sobering Census Report: Americans’ Meager Income Gains
The New York Times, August 29th, 2007
The economic party is winding down and most working Americans never even got near the punch bowl.
The Census Bureau reported yesterday that median household income
rose 0.7 percent last year — its second annual increase in a row — to
$48,201. The share of households living in poverty fell to 12.3 percent
from 12.6 percent in 2005. This seems like welcome news, but a deeper
look at the belated improvement in these numbers — more than five years
after the end of the last recession — underscores how the gains from
economic growth have failed to benefit most of the population.
The
median household income last year was still about $1,000 less than in
2000, before the onset of the last recession. In 2006, 36.5 million
Americans were living in poverty — 5 million more than six years
before, when the poverty rate fell to 11.3 percent.
And what is perhaps most disturbing is that it appears this is as good as it’s going to get.
Sputtering
under the weight of the credit crisis and the associated drop in the
housing market, the economic expansion that started in 2001 looks like
it might enter history books with the dubious distinction of being the
only sustained expansion on record in which the incomes of typical
American households never reached the peak of the previous cycle. It
seems that ordinary working families are going to have to wait — at the
very minimum — until the next cycle to make up the losses they suffered
in this one. There’s no guarantee they will.
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