Doug Short offers an update on median household income based on Sentier Research’s monthly look at Census Bureau data.
In October, the most recent data available, when adjusted for inflation, median household income compared with last October rose $2,845. That’s a 5.3 percent increase.
But as you can see from the above chart, that rise still left the household median worth $1,110 less than it was in January 2008, and $1,217 below what it was in February 2002. Sentier spokesman Gordon Green stated in a press release:
“Even though median annual household income did not increase significantly in October 2015, we continue to see an upward trend in income that has been evident since the low point in August 2011. We have now recaptured all of the income losses that have occurred since June 2009, when the great recession ended, and the October 2015 median is nearly the same as the median that existed when the great recession began in December 2007. The October 2015 median is now only 1.2 percent lower than the median of $57,372 in January 2000, the beginning of our statistical series.”
While the median household income is finally almost back to where it was eight years ago, the recovery has been ruinously slow. It’s one more measure of how the middle class has been slipping economically. The middle class itself has shrunk. Since 1970, the middle class has gone from a 62 percent share of the nation’s income to just 43 percent. Meanwhile, the upper class went from a 29 percent share to a 49 percent share. The lower class has gone from a 10 percent share to a 9 percent share.
Inequality isn’t, of course, just a factor of income. Tami Luhby reports:
The median net worth of upper class families doubled between 1983 and 2013, up to $650,100.
But the wealth of the middle class has increased a near negligible 2% over that time to $98,100. At least they fared better than lower-income Americans, who saw their wealth drop 18% to $9,500.
That’s not an accident. It’s also not, despite how the plutocrats would like us to see it, the immutable natural economic order.