“You can’t feed a family with GDP”
by digby
That’s Neil Irwin’s line in the piece that accompanies this rather stunning chart:
The census numbers on what American families made last year are as mediocre as they are predictable. We now know that if your household brought in $51,939 in income last year, you were right at the 50th percentile, with half of households doing better and half doing worse. In inflation-adjusted terms, that is up a mere 0.3 percent from 2012. If you’re counting, that’s an extra $180 in annual real income for a middle-income American family. Don’t spend your extra $3.46 a week all in one place.
Going back a little further, the numbers are even gloomier. The 2013 median income remained a whopping 8 percent — about $4,500 per year — below where it was in 2007. The 2008 recession depressed wages for middle-income Americans, and they haven’t recovered in any meaningful way. And 2007 household incomes were actually below the 1999 peak.
But hey, it’s nothing a little war won’t fix, amirite? That is our preferred way of stimulating the economy after all. Keeps us from getting soft.
On the other hand we had a little incident in 2001 and a subsequent war and look at that chart. It doesn’t seem to be working anymore.
.