The Biden administration doesn’t seem to understand why the American people haven’t given them “credit” for the state of the nation’s economy. Maybe they finally need to wake up and realize that people don’t like how “Bidenomics” has fueled “Bidenflation.”
The Census Bureau recently released its annual reports on income, poverty, and health insurance coverage. The reports illustrate how families have lost ground since the Covid pandemic, and why low unemployment, or even rising wages, will not lead to positive feelings about the economy unless and until inflation gets under control.
American Households Losing Money
The most telling numbers in the reports come in Table A-2 of the income study. One column of that table lists household median income for a given year. (Median income refers to the 50th percentile of the distribution — that is, half of households made more than this amount, while half made less.) The numbers since the pandemic illustrate how American families have lost ground:
2019: $78,250
2020: $76,660 ($1,590 below 2019)
2021: $76,330 ($1,920 below 2019)
2022: $74,580 ($3,670 below 2019)
To put it another way, last year the median American household made $3,670 less in income than it did before the Covid pandemic.
The median income numbers are reported on a “real,” i.e., inflation-adjusted, basis. And the fact that inflation, as measured by the consumer price index, rose by 7.8 percent in 2022 — the largest increase since 1981, the census notes — explains why median household income fell by 2.3 percent last
