US Household Income Hits Record High in 2016: Improvements for Everyone

The U.S. Census Bureau announced this week that real median household income increased by 3.2 percent between 2015 and 2016.

It’s now the highest income year on record, beating the previous high of $58,655 in 1999 (all numbers are adjusted for inflation). Some 40.6 million of people were in poverty past year, 2.5 million fewer than in 2015.

The country’s poverty rate declined to 12.7 percent returning back to what it was in 2007 prior to a monetary crisis and gaping depression bashed the workers in ways that the scars were left to heal.

Real median incomes in 2016 for family households ($75,062) and non-family households ($35,761) increased 2.7 percent and 4.5 percent, respectively, from their 2015 medians. Again, a growing economy and job creation helped lift families above that number. He said that numerous items on Trump’s agenda “would raise poverty, widen inequality, or reduce health insurance coverage”.

We’ve got new numbers today from the U.S. Census Bureau on poverty in America.

Another measurement was on health insurance.

YDSTIE: Well, there’s some good news there, too.

Americans 65 and older were the only demographic group for whom the proportion of people with income below 50 percent of the poverty threshold increased. But Quebec’s rates were also low, which Statistics Canada speculated may have been because of the province’s low cost of childcare. There, the ranks of uninsured dropped from 17.2 percent to 7.3 percent from 2013 to 2016, census data show.

“They have the lowest (Medicaid) reimbursement rates for doctors in the country”, he said.

“We see all of these things increasing for women over a long period of time”, Heisz said.

For poverty, bureau said the rates were comparable. In general, 40.3 per cent of single-parent families were low-income, compared to just 11.9 per cent of two-parent families. Meanwhile, the poverty rate for non-Hispanic whites and Asians in 2016 were 8.8 percent and 10.1 percent, both of which were statistically indistinguishable from the rates in 2015.

The poverty rate has returned to pre-recession levels.

The Economic Policy Institute, a liberal research organization based in Washington, estimated that without the change in methodology, median household income was still roughly 2.3 percent below the record high – and 1.6 percent below the level reached in 2007. So really, when you zoom out, not much improvement in this century for those middle-income households.

There were differences across regions as well. That is 16th-highest in the state and slightly above the 13.7 percent nationwide average in 2016.