Census: Poverty Up, Wages Down
What sort of "recovery" is this?
(Reuters) - American household incomes lost ground last year and the poverty rate ticked up, a sign the U.S. economic expansion had yet to lead to gains for many Americans five years after the 2007-2009 recession.
The data released by the U.S. Census Bureau on Wednesday, which showed the inflation-adjusted median income slipping to $53,657 last year from $54,462 in 2013, offered a reminder of the tepid nature of the economy's recovery.
The unemployment rate is the lowest since 2008, but median wages are still 6.5% lower than 2007 and going nowhere.
Something is seriously wrong here. This is not the way it should be after six years of "recovery".
At the same time, the poverty rate ticked up to 14.8 percent from 14.5 percent in 2013, the data showed. Census researchers said the changes in both the median income and poverty rate were not statistically significant.
The Census bureau calls the 0.3% rise in poverty "not statistically significant", but I don't think that's how thousands of American households feel.
Poverty going up and wages falling has traditionally been a sign of a recession, not a recovery.
OTOH, the rich are doing great!
If this is the "new normal" then it's time to ditch the current political paradigm.
Comments
an easy question to answer in a way...
it is the recovery that the few people who hold the economy's and the political commanding heights want.
It is the proverbial
"jobless recovery" which means that our economy is designed to work for only a few at the top while the rest of us languish.
Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy
It's not a jobless recovery
It's a "wageless" recovery. You can get a job. Just not a job that you can live on.
I agree and it is probably both
Unemployment is still high, underemployment and part time employment is becoming the norm.
Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy
It's an "official" recovery....
It's the kind that mainstream economists and pols love, you know, the handmaids of the ruling rich. Keep the workers hungry and virtually homeless, and they'll come begging for any kind of pittance you want to pay them.
Marx and Engels called the unemployed and underemployed a "reserve army of labor" because they could be counted on to accept whatever wages and working conditions the boss was willing to impose and could thus be deployed to counter any demands for better wages and working conditions, particularly when those demands come from a union.
Every day, and every fresh recession, I see more and more evidence that my reading of Marx and Engels really has prepared me for seeing what fresh hell an economy of the wealthy, for the wealthy, and by the wealthy can visit upon the toiling masses, and I marvel at how prescient and solid their analysis was. Whatever "free market" beginnings Capitalism may have had and opportunities it may have opened have long since died out and been closed. It looks more and more like the game is up and too many of us are too far behind in noticing it.
"Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we're being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I'm liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That's what's insane about it."
-- John Lennon
Even Digby agrees that the economy is "pretty good".
Even Digby — the pseudonym of Heather Parton of Santa Monica, California and one of my two favorite Democratic bloggers — seems to agree that "the U.S. economy is looking pretty good."
Digby / Hullabaloo: Why all the saber-rattling?
Democrats are raring to run in 2016 on how well the economy has done under President Obama?
Sounds really strange and tone-deaf to me.