I would think that this observation from the editors of the Wall Street Journal:
Real median household incomes ticked up 1.8% to $61,372 between 2016 and 2017 while the poverty rate dropped 0.4 percentage points to 12.3%, according to the Census Bureau. Income gains were strongest among Hispanic households (3.7%). The poverty rates for blacks and Hispanics fell to 21.2% and 18.3%, respectively, the lowest since at least 1972.
Incomes increased across the distribution range with the share of people earning less than $15,000 declining 0.3 percentage points to 10.7%, the lowest level since 2007. The proportion of households earning more than $150,000 increased by 0.7 percentage points to 14.7%.
describes things we should be able to agree are welcome developments. Rather than sniping and finger-pointing, why not try to figure out why it’s happening and whatever is causing it do more of it. IMO at the very least it tells us that jobs are better than no jobs. I actually ran across an economist arguing that jobs just weren’t important the other day if you can believe it.
Perhaps the only “negative†was sluggish wage growth in the Black demo.
Now that I’m back from the Yukon and watching TV re: Florence I was doing some channel flipping. Neither CNN nor MSNBC seem to cover the economy anymore. At least the BBC has US economy focused reporters (Snicker).
It’s slow and steady, and I endorse your sentiment. It’s a far cry better than the potential statistics cited by the exiting administration. As I’ve noted elsewhere, who know what the Fed and trade policies will do net net.
This is good news, but I agree that we should look at how we achieved it. When you do that, you discover that at the end of the Obama admin we were almost at all of those record levels. That we had upward trends on most of those numbers. People like Drew want us to believe that we just suddenly went from awful numbers (they had to be awful if Obama was POTUS) to positive record setting numbers. We should want to know what has given us these positive long term trends AND why they continue to be positive.
Steve
I think Aerosmith made a song called “Dream On,” steve.