CENSUS: ECONOMY IS GOING NOWHERE
John Hinderaker, Powerline
The Census Bureau released its income and poverty numbers for 2014 today. The poverty rate was up slightly and median family income, inflation-adjusted, was down slightly, but both numbers were essentially flat. U.S. News goes out on a limb:
The numbers may explain some of the political furor going on in the country, said Lawrence Mishel, president and CEO of the liberal Economic Policy Institute. “Anyone wondering why people in this country are feeling so ornery need look no further than this report,” Mishel said. “Wages have been broadly stagnant for a dozen years and median household income peaked in 1999.”
Yes, Bernie Sanders and the rest of the Democratic presidential field are running against the bad effects of the policies they advocated and, in Sanders’ case, voted for. I found this interesting:
Asian households had the highest median income in the United States at $74,300 in 2014. The median income for non-Hispanic white households was $60,300, for black households $35,400 and Hispanic households $42,500. The median income for white households decreased by 1.7 percent between 2013 and 2014, while there was no statistically significant change for black, Asian, and Hispanic households.
One more reason why the Democrats’ half-hearted efforts to win back the white middle class are doomed.
I think it is bizarre that so little attention has been paid to the fact that Asians’ incomes have considerably outstripped whites’. The Asian-American population is now approaching 20 million, and their household incomes are now 23% higher than whites’, on the average. This is a rather stunning statistic. Why is so little attention paid to this income “gap”? Is it the result of discrimination against whites? If not, what could the cause possibly be?
I think the reason for the media’s silence on these numbers is that there is no good way to fit them into the narrative.
