The median household income has fallen for the 5th year in a row…
Median household income fell for the fifth straight year in 2012, the Census Bureau reported on Tuesday, to $51,017. That was the lowest annual income, adjusted for inflation, since 1995.
The typical American family’s income has fallen every year since 2007, the year the Great Recession began, for a cumulative decline of 8.3 percent. Median income is also down 9 percent from its record high of $56,080, set two recessions ago in 1999. (Story continues below depressing chart.)
While median income has fallen, the incomes of top earners have continued to rise, making income inequality worse. The Census Bureau’s measure of inequality, known as the “Gini index,” held steady at 0.477 in 2012, but at the record high set in 2011. A Gini index of 0 means perfect income equality, an index of 1 means one person would get all of the nation’s income. We’re slowly grinding our way towards 1.
What is the aftermath of the Great recession and the (a-hem) “recovery” in America today? Jay Bookman found some statistics, in a study by Emmanuel Saez of UC Berkeley…
— Between 2009 and 2012, the top earning 1 percent of U.S. households collected 95 percent of household income growth. The remaining 99 percent of American households made do by fighting over the leftover 5 percent.
— Overall, income for the top 1 percent grew by 31.4 percent in the last three years. Income for everybody else grew by 0.4 percent.
— During the Great Recession of 2007-2009, incomes for the lowest-earning 99 percent of U.S. households fell by 11.6 percent, “the largest fall on record in any two-year period since the Great Depression.”
— The share of national income going to the top 0.01 percent of households — in 2012, that’s the roughly 16,000 households that earn more than $10.25 million a year — is now higher than it was at its previous historic peak of 1928. As Saez notes, that was “the peak of the stock market bubble in the ‘roaring’ 1920s,” just prior to the Great Depression.
— Forty years ago, the highest-earning 1 percent of households collected roughly 9 percent of national income. Today, those households collect roughly 23 percent of national income. Today, the top-earning 0.01 percent of households collects five times as much of the national income as they did 40 years ago. I know that we’re supposed to believe that today’s 0.01 percent must therefore be working five times as hard as their counterparts did in the 1970s, but forgive me if I don’t buy it.
– For the first time in the near-century for which such data is available, the top 10 percent of U.S. households — those with 2012 incomes of $114,000 and above — now account for more than 50 percent of overall household income. Forty years ago, that top 10 percent earned roughly a third of the national household income, leaving 67 percent to be spread among their fellow Americans. And again, most of that concentration is concentrated even more tightly at the very top.
Once again, the Randian myths that have been fed to Americans for a generation were just fairy tales. American worker productivity is at its highest and the reward that we all were told would come with “doing the right things” is going elsewhere…
This is from 2007 and it has gotten worse…
