Things to ponder
The article: Click here to read all the comments
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September 10, 2009, 11:52 am
A Decade With No Income Gains
By David Leonhardt
The typical American household made less money last year than the typical household made a full decade ago.
To me, that’s the big news from the Census Bureau’s annual report on income, poverty and health insurance, which was released this morning. Median household fell to $50,303 last year, from $52,163 in 2007. In 1998, median income was $51,295. All these numbers are adjusted for inflation.
In the four decades that the Census Bureau has been tracking household income, there has never before been a full decade in which median income failed to rise. (The previous record was seven years, ending in 1985.) Other Census data suggest that it also never happened between the late 1940s and the late 1960s. So it doesn’t seem to have happened since at least the 1930s.
And the streak probably won’t end in 2009, either. Unemployment has been rising all year, which is a strong sign income will fall.
What’s going on here? It’s a combination of two trends. One, economic growth in the current decade has been slower than in any decade since before World War II. Two, inequality has risen sharply, so much of the bounty from our growth has gone to a relatively small slice of the population.
Catherine Rampell has more details on the Census report, including some good charts.
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2 interesting comments:
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This is what you get from three decades of Republican economic policy (and I’m including Clinton in this as well.) Three decades of deregulating business, eating away protections for working people, disinvestment in public goods, and the constant fetishization of “free markets” that in reality were not free but in fact skewed via subsidies and regulatory winks in favor of big business and corporate lobbies.
I truly fear for this country. Over the past three decades we’ve squandered our wealth in favor of tax cuts for the wealthy (with a few bones thrown in to seduce those lower down the income scale) and candy for corporations, and now we’re facing economic exhaustion and probably long-term stagnation, if not outright decline, in real incomes. Yet neither party has done anything to prepare Americans mentally or emotionally for what lies in store.
The vast majority of Americans think they’re entitled as a matter of birthright to steadily increasing incomes and more stuff. What happens when over the next few years it becomes clear that we’re not going through just a temporary blip, but we have to readjust our expectations permanently downward? A large part, if not a majority, of this country believes we’re the greatest country in the history of the world because Jesus says so in the Bible, and therefore things can only get better. I worry that, when it becomes clear things are not getting better, they’ll look around for people to blame. Things will get far uglier than they are right now.
- Jason
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We have lost our mojo. Post-industrial capitalism is on the ropes but still ducking and weaving and avoiding every blow. The national infrastructure is creaking. The middle class is waning. The rich are out sailing. The poor are slinking from couch to couch. The schools are segregating by socioeconomic category. We are mired in foreign wars we can’t hope to win…or end. The planet is heating up. Our food is turning into corn syrup. Our academies are becoming auxiliaries to profiteers. NIMBYism rules the land. Our prisons are bursting at their seams, and their yards are ruled by overt racism. Fox and Limbaugh rule the airwaves. Politicians have become cynical street fighters, finger-pointers, and outright liars. Our drug-obsessed young people have their heads in the sand, their butts in the air singing “Happy Daze is Here Again.” We owe our souls to Saudi princes and Chinese bureaucrats.
We’ve quite a mess on our hands. Let’s give Obama a hand in the next election, and give him a congress and some state legislatures that will step up and help him start the change we so obviously need.
- LLon
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September 10, 2009, 11:52 am
A Decade With No Income Gains
By David Leonhardt
The typical American household made less money last year than the typical household made a full decade ago.
To me, that’s the big news from the Census Bureau’s annual report on income, poverty and health insurance, which was released this morning. Median household fell to $50,303 last year, from $52,163 in 2007. In 1998, median income was $51,295. All these numbers are adjusted for inflation.
In the four decades that the Census Bureau has been tracking household income, there has never before been a full decade in which median income failed to rise. (The previous record was seven years, ending in 1985.) Other Census data suggest that it also never happened between the late 1940s and the late 1960s. So it doesn’t seem to have happened since at least the 1930s.
And the streak probably won’t end in 2009, either. Unemployment has been rising all year, which is a strong sign income will fall.
What’s going on here? It’s a combination of two trends. One, economic growth in the current decade has been slower than in any decade since before World War II. Two, inequality has risen sharply, so much of the bounty from our growth has gone to a relatively small slice of the population.
Catherine Rampell has more details on the Census report, including some good charts.
----------------------------------------------------------
2 interesting comments:
----------------------------------------------------------
This is what you get from three decades of Republican economic policy (and I’m including Clinton in this as well.) Three decades of deregulating business, eating away protections for working people, disinvestment in public goods, and the constant fetishization of “free markets” that in reality were not free but in fact skewed via subsidies and regulatory winks in favor of big business and corporate lobbies.
I truly fear for this country. Over the past three decades we’ve squandered our wealth in favor of tax cuts for the wealthy (with a few bones thrown in to seduce those lower down the income scale) and candy for corporations, and now we’re facing economic exhaustion and probably long-term stagnation, if not outright decline, in real incomes. Yet neither party has done anything to prepare Americans mentally or emotionally for what lies in store.
The vast majority of Americans think they’re entitled as a matter of birthright to steadily increasing incomes and more stuff. What happens when over the next few years it becomes clear that we’re not going through just a temporary blip, but we have to readjust our expectations permanently downward? A large part, if not a majority, of this country believes we’re the greatest country in the history of the world because Jesus says so in the Bible, and therefore things can only get better. I worry that, when it becomes clear things are not getting better, they’ll look around for people to blame. Things will get far uglier than they are right now.
- Jason
----------------------------------------------------------
We have lost our mojo. Post-industrial capitalism is on the ropes but still ducking and weaving and avoiding every blow. The national infrastructure is creaking. The middle class is waning. The rich are out sailing. The poor are slinking from couch to couch. The schools are segregating by socioeconomic category. We are mired in foreign wars we can’t hope to win…or end. The planet is heating up. Our food is turning into corn syrup. Our academies are becoming auxiliaries to profiteers. NIMBYism rules the land. Our prisons are bursting at their seams, and their yards are ruled by overt racism. Fox and Limbaugh rule the airwaves. Politicians have become cynical street fighters, finger-pointers, and outright liars. Our drug-obsessed young people have their heads in the sand, their butts in the air singing “Happy Daze is Here Again.” We owe our souls to Saudi princes and Chinese bureaucrats.
We’ve quite a mess on our hands. Let’s give Obama a hand in the next election, and give him a congress and some state legislatures that will step up and help him start the change we so obviously need.
- LLon