In a note of statistical good news for U.S. workers, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that last year, median income for all U.S. full-time workers finally surpassed the high it reached just before the coronavirus-caused shutdowns trashed much of the U.S. economy five years ago. It rose 4% last year, matching last year’s inflation rate.
And inflation was cut almost in half between 2022 and 2023. It was 7.8% two years ago, Census said.
Not only that, but income inequality, while still wide, shrank a little. The ultra-rich top tenth saw their median income increase by 4.6%, while the median for the poorest tenth rose by 6.7%. The rest of the nation fell between those two figures.
Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who has championed workers and slammed the rich for decades, said in a video the same day the numbers haven’t really changed.
“We have more income and wealth inequality than has ever existed in the history of the United States,” he declared. “The billionaire class is doing phenomenally well. Sixty percent of Americans live paycheck to paycheck and the gap between the rich and the poor is growing wider and wider.
“We’ve gotta take on the greed of the billionaire class and say ‘Yes, you know what, guys? When we’ve got 600,000 people sleeping out on the streets, when people can’t afford to send their kids to college, you know what? You’re gonna start paying your fair share of taxes.’
“Dealing with the massive level of income and wealth inequality is exactly what we’ve got to do.”
The Census reported an official poverty rate of one in every nine Americans, or 36.8 million people, last year. That includes one of every five Spanish-speakers, and 15.3% of all kids.
But a separate “supplemental” census figure, adding in benefits such as food stamps, Medicaid and housing vouchers, but subtracting medical care costs, housing and transportation, put the overall poverty rate at one in eight, not one in nine.
The poverty numbers are a far cry from the figures the Poor People’s Campaign cites. But its co-chair, the Rev. William Barber II, always carefully points out that their data, from a comprehensive survey—pre-coronavirus—includes not just the poor but low-wealth people, too.
Low-wealth people are people, 66 million of whom are white, who lack home equity, savings or both, to sustain themselves should an emergency or a disaster—everything from an auto crash to a hurricane--hit. They’d be wiped out financially.
The data backed Sanders’ point about the ultra-rich. The census reported the wealthiest fifth of the country still garnered just more than half of all income in both years. There was a slight decline in their income share, but the census experts called it “not statistically significant."
The decades-old racial income gap persisted, showing the goal of Dr. Martin Luther King’s famous March on Washington for jobs and justice is not fulfilled. The gender income gap widened, too.
Real median household incomes increased by 5.4% for white households and 5.7% for non-Hispanic white households between 2022 and 2023. Black households had a median gain half of that for non-Hispanic whites, Hispanic households gained only 0.4% and Asian household incomes slid 0.2%.
Full-time working women also saw median income decline, the Census figures showed. Last year, a full-time working woman earned 82.7 cents for every dollar the median man made. The year before, the median pay for a full-time working woman was 84 cents per working man’s dollar. The median is the point where half the group is above the figure and half is below.
The Census Bureau experts listed several reasons for that decline. One was that proportionally more working women lost their jobs when the coronavirus plague hit and thus more came back into the workforce. Another was those prior jobs had lower pay and so do their current jobs.
Returning woman workers were joined by an increasing share of young working women, who start out below their male counterparts, even at the bottom of the income scale, the analysts noted.
“The worsening gender wage gap is a national disgrace and further evidence market forces are not enough to solve for gender inequity and women continue to get left behind, even in a strong economy,” said Dr. Jamila Taylor, CEO of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, in a statement.
“As a single working mom, I know firsthand the challenges women face in the workforce—lack of child care, outright discrimination, racial bias, low wages—and I know how this affects our health and well-being and family’s financial security, as women’s wages often form the backbone of household earnings.
“We cannot ask women in this country to endure these injustices decade after decade while offering only empty promises. Accelerating the pace of change on this fundamental issue should be a top priority for all policymakers and candidates for office.”
