United States household incomes slip, poverty rate up slightly in 2014

There was no change in the United States poverty rate in 2014 compared to 2013, the U.S. Census Bureau reported Wednesday in its annual report.

At the same time, the nation’s official poverty rate stayed level at 14.8 percent, equivalent to 46.7 million people in poverty.

Income is back to where it was years ago, but precise comparisons are now hard because Census changed its methodology last year so it could provide a more detailed look at the sources of Americans’ income. In 2013, the poverty rate fell for the first time since 2006, while inequality hovered at the highest it has been since at least the 90s.

Yet the data released by the USA census bureau on Wednesday shows that average Americans have yet to feel the full impact of the recovery. That means that as the population grows, so does the total number of people living in poverty in America.

Families of four with an income of below $24,230 are considered to be living in poverty.

The decrease wasn’t statistically significant, the third straight year in which incomes were essentially flat. “It’s not unusual for it not to go down two years in a row”, said Trudi J. Renwick, chief of the Poverty Statistics Branch in the bureau’s Housing and Household Economic Statistics Division.

The findings largely reflect the coverage expansions engineered by the Affordable Care Act, President Barack Obama’s signature legislative achievement, which requires most Americans to have health insurance or pay a fine.

“In 2014, real median household income was 6.5 percent lower than in 2007, the year before the most recent recession”, Census researchers wrote. This figure dropped to 10.4% in 2014.

The added: “Continued employment and wage growth so far this year suggests that incomes are rising in 2015”. Some 29 million people lacked coverage, down 7 million from a year earlier, the report found.

USA poverty did not decline in 2014, nor did median household incomes rise, despite the ongoing economic recovery.

– The 2014 median earning of men was $50,400, while the median earning for women was $39,600. The income of naturalized citizens and noncitizens were not statistically different from the year before.

USA households also made no headway in the long-running problem of stagnant incomes, despite an increase in the number of year-round full-time workers.