A huge jump in income in the last year, bringing incomes close to where they were before the crash. Imagine how much faster this could have happened without Republican obstruction:
The U.S. Census Bureau announced today that real median household income increased by 5.2 percent between 2014 and 2015 while the official poverty rate decreased 1.2 percentage points. At the same time, the percentage of people without health insurance coverage decreased.
Median household income in the United States in 2015 was $56,516, an increase in real terms of 5.2 percent from the 2014 median income of $53,718. This is the first annual increase in median household income since 2007, the year before the most recent recession.
The nation’s official poverty rate in 2015 was 13.5 percent, with 43.1 million people in poverty, 3.5 million fewer than in 2014. The 1.2 percentage point decrease in the poverty rate from 2014 to 2015 represents the largest annual percentage point drop in poverty since 1999.
The percentage of people without health insurance coverage for the entire 2015 calendar year was 9.1 percent, down from 10.4 percent in 2014. The number of people without health insurance declined to 29.0 million from 33.0 million over the period.
The number of people without health insurance now has to be broken down into subparts reflecting states that took or refused Medicaid coverage under the ACA to be neutral.
I don’t know about the word unequivocally. Let’s wait a few days or weeks on that . Right now that sounds suspiciously too good to be true.
I am on a listserv with a lot of economists and they all say it’s really good.