US Median Family Income Actually Less Than in 2000

So much for that boom:

The bigger problem is that the now-finished boom was, for most Americans, nothing of the sort. In 2000, at the end of the previous economic expansion, the median American family made about $61,000, according to the Census Bureau’s inflation-adjusted numbers. In 2007, in what looks to have been the final year of the most recent expansion, the median family, amazingly, seems to have made less — about $60,500. … You can think of this as the most basic test of an economy’s health: does it produce ever-rising living standards for its citizens? “We have had expansions before where the bottom end didn’t do well,” said Lawrence F. Katz, a Harvard economist who studies the job market. “But we’ve never had an expansion in which the middle of income distribution had no wage growth.”

Freedom is on the march!


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One response to “US Median Family Income Actually Less Than in 2000”

  1. Mark Avatar

    Wow, that’s amazing. But somebody’s making the money, right? I still can’t get over how “middle class” folk will still unconditionally defend the system even though they’re getting pushed further out of the picture.
    Not to be too much of a downer, but with spiraling gasoline and world food prices, it sure seems like things could get ugly.

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