Yesterday, the Census Bureau released the latest edition of their Current Population Survey, titled Income, Poverty and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2006 (PDF).
The New York Times reviewed the report and found that its news about working peoples' incomes is not great:
The Census Bureau reported yesterday that median household income rose 0.7 percent last year — it’s second annual increase in a row— to $48,201. The share of households living in poverty fell to 12.3 percent from 12.6 percent in 2005. This seems like welcome news, but a deeper look at the belated improvement in these numbers — more than five years after the end of the last recession — underscores how the gains from economic growth have failed to benefit most of the population...
[The data] suggest that when household incomes rose, it was because more members of the household went to work, not because anybody got a bigger paycheck. The median income of working-age households, those headed by somebody younger than 65, remained more than 2 percent lower than in 2001, the year of the recession.
(Emphasis mine.)
And the news about health insurance coverage is worse:
The number of uninsured Americans has been rising inexorably over the past six years as soaring health care costs have driven up premiums, employers have scaled back or eliminated health benefits and hard-pressed families have found themselves unable to purchase insurance at a reasonable price. Last year, the number of uninsured Americans increased by a daunting 2.2 million, from 44.8 million in 2005 to 47.0 million in 2006...
The main reason for the upsurge in uninsured Americans is that employment-based coverage continued to deteriorate. Indeed, the number of full-time workers without health insurance rose from 20.8 million in 2005 to 22.0 million in 2006, presumably because either the employers or the workers or both found it too costly.
(Again, emphasis mine. Health insurance too costly for workers to keep up? Sure sounds familiar, doesn't it?)
The raving socialists at the Wall Street Journal agree with the Times' assessment:
Five years into an economic recovery, the benefits of growth are finally filtering down to some of the poorest Americans and the income of the typical family is climbing. But earnings of full-time workers aren't keeping up with inflation, and the ranks of those without health insurance are rising...
The report also showed how meager some of the gains for those in the middle class have been, the result, in part, of decades-long trend toward wider income inequality. The top fifth of households captured 50.5% of pretax income last year; the bottom three-fifths shared 26.5%. Two decades ago, the best-off fifth received 46.2% while the bottom three-fifths claimed 29.5%.
