American incomes are down 8.3% since 2007

[n2doc]

Matt Phillips and Ritchie King



Five years after the US financial crisis struck, American household incomes are still stuck.
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Median income for the typical American household was $51,017 in 2012, leaving it 8.3% lower than where it was in 2007, the year before the financial crisis hit. Median household income was roughly flat compared to 2011.
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Those official, inflation-adjusted figures are fresh out of the US Census Bureau this morning. (See the full update here.) Median household income—which means half of American households earn more and half earn less than the figure—is one of the most closely watched and easily understood gauges of how American families are faring economically.
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Things look even worse from a longer-term perspective. Since 1999, when US household incomes hit all time peak of $56,080, median household income has tumbled 9%.

more
http://qz.com/124935/american-incomes-are-down-8-3-since-2007/

[MannyGoldstein]

1. Individual median income peaked in the mid 1970s

The government started using family income instead, because it looked better as we started needing more earners per household. Now, even that won't hide the disaster.

[DJ13]

2. No problems

If conservatives have their way, pretty soon children's wages can be included in family income.

[phantom power]

4. that would be funnier if I didn't suspect it could happen

[Art_from_Ark]

10. No doubt they are busy making preparations for their

"Benefits of Repealing Child Labor Laws" campaign as we speak

[Spitfire of ATJ]

8. They used to regularly judge the economy by how much people had in savings....

Then they started talking about "disposable income".

Now they tell us the chocolate ration was raised from 30 grams to 25 grams.

[BelgianMadCow]

13. chocolate rations?

I re-read it too. Chilling.

War is Peace
Ignorance is Strength
Freedom is Slavery

[mick063]

3. Amazon Warehouse

is a very representative backdrop for a speech celebrating job growth.

How do you spot the difference between 1% puppets and those that represent the working man?

The puppets campaign for jobs.

The true representatives campaign against income disparity and the concentration/centralization of wealth.

[Marr]

6. +1

[LittleBlue]

7. Bingo. nt

[BlueToTheBone]

5. It feels deeper than that to me.

But that's just personal. Our business gross is down and our costs are still rising.

[progressoid]

9. angry rec.

[hfojvt]

11. my own is up probably over 100% since 2007

but still only 62% of the median

Which is not bad for a single guy.

I started working part time in October 2006, partly because I could not deal with my loony supervisor and partly because I was afraid the whole banking system might collapse due to Bush policies.

Started working full time in September 2011 after my supervisor retired, and presumably after the financial system had survived its near collapse.

Median income is a funny statistic though, not always relevant to most people.

Let's say you had 9 people making $30,000 a year, two people making $100,000 a year and 9 people making $300,000 a year.

In this example, the median income is $100,000 because half are above it and half below it. The average income is $158,500.

Are either of those numbers relevant to either the poor people or the rich people? I'd say no. Look at a few examples.

Say the income of the $30,000 people stays the same, the income of the $100,000 people goes down to $90,000 and the income of the $300,000 people goes up to $500,000.

So the median falls to $90,000. Yet only two people are worse off than before.

Try it the other way. The income of the $30,000 people falls to $20,000. The income of the $100,000 people goes to $110,000 and the income of the $300,000 people goes to $180,000. Yeah, median income is UP to $110,000 (and yet 90% of the people are worse off).

Changes in the median do NOT necessarily reflect changes for everybody, only for people who are near the median.

Consider some other examples. Suppose a person was working making $70,000 a year, and they reach that happiest of all days - the day of retirement. Now his/her income falls to $35,000 thus putting them below the median, and also, in a small way, making the median lower. But are they worse off? Hell no. Certainly not if they hate their job as much as I do. They traded a 100% cut in their hours of work for a 50% cut in their pay.

So, this drop in the median income, although not a positive thing, hardly means that every American is worse off than they were in 2007, or even that most people are worse off.

[n2doc]

12. Except we know the vast majority of income gains over the past 5 years

have gone to the top 1% of wage earners. Glad you have done well, but there is no way to spin this as a good thing for the average American family.

[hfojvt]

14. is that "top 1% of wage earners" or top 1% of income?

Plus that includes a lot of aggregating. My own gains, as a member of the bottom 20% are offset by my supervisor's loss. His income went down - because he retired, the lucky SOB.

Take a real life example. Here's the people making over $100,000 and less than $200,000. For Obama and OWS, these people are "middle class" since they are not part of the 1%. Much less are they one of the 11,000 families who are the 0.01%. In 2009, 13,480 tax filers had income over $10,000,000. In 2009, 13,851,341 filers had income over $100,000 and less than $200,000.

That's a lot of people, but not part of "the middle" because 58,912,000 filers had income less than $25,000. And about 53,000,000 had income over $25,000 and less than $75,000.

So, taking one person in that group, a household with $180,000 in income in 2007. Now suppose they have not had ANY gain in REAL income since then. Is this some sort of horrible tragedy? Are they "suffering" while the 0.01% lives it up? I am guessing that most of the 110 million people making less than $75,000 would be quite happy to find themselves "stagnating" at even $120,000 a year.

My simple point, for which I tried to provide some proof, is that you cannot take a statistic like median income and prove that everybody is worse off.

It used to bug me in 1999 in the opposite direction. I would read in the papers about rising median incomes and about how great the economy was and how prosperous America was and rage at those commentators. Just because median income was up did not meant that everybody was doing well. I was stuck working a temp job, wishing I could get a real job. And every month I would read about these record low unemployment rates. Yet my job search was futile. I had to leave the state to find a job, a job I lost in less than six months.

[Le Taz Hot]

15. May I point out that this is taken from surveys conducted

by the U.S. Census Bureau? I say this to ask people to please cooperate if they are ever asked to answer survey questions from the U.S. Census Bureau. The surveys utilizes Sample Units scattered across the country to represent the entire nation and information on income, house, health insurance, etc., is vital to the nation, your state and your local community. It determines how much and where federal, state and municipal funds are allocated. Just a polite request to please cooperate if asked to participate in one of these.