Incomes Are Up and Poverty Is Down, but Guess Which Americans Have Gained the Most

“We’ve got a long way to go to get the people at the bottom to where they were.”

RyanKing999/iStock

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Poverty was down in the United States last year and so was the number of Americans without health insurance. Our median household incomes had their best one-year increase ever, topping $56,500—the highest level since 2007, just before the Great Recession.

New figures released this week by the US Census Bureau show that many Americans are finally reaping the benefits of the nation’s economic recovery. The changes accompany a year of job growth—unemployment dropped from 6.2 percent in 2014 to 5.3 percent in 2015—and modest raises to minimum wages in 21 states and DC, notes Sheldon Danziger, president of the Russell Sage Foundation. Danzinger says he also anticipates a “modest gain” in growth for 2016. “The good news is the economy is moving in the right direction. We’ve recovered almost all the ground lost during the Great Recession,” he says. “The bad news, of course: We’ve got a long way to go to get people at the bottom and in the middle to where they were at the turn of the century.”

Here are some highlights from the new Census data:

Raises for most: Americans across the board benefited from increases in household income from 2014 to 2015, regardless of their race, gender, age, or legal status. Hispanic families saw the largest gains (6.1 percent) in median household income, followed by white families (4.4 percent) and black families (4.1 percent). Still, those incomes remained below their pre-recession highs. 

U.S. Census Bureau

The gender pay gap decreased, if barely: In 2015, women earned 80 cents for each dollar earned by men, up a penny from the year before. A woman working full-time in 2015 earned $40,742, a 3 percent bump from 2014, but still $10,000 less than what the median man made. 

Black and Hispanic women fared better compared with men of the same race. Among Hispanics, according to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, women made 87 cents to a man’s dollar. Black women earned 88 cents. But when compared with white men, Hispanic women made 54 cents per dollar, while black women earned 63 cents.

The poor and the middle class gained—but the rich gained more: While median household incomes rose at a higher rate for poor and middle-class families, the rich reaped far more in absolute terms. For example, a 5.2 percent income gain netted middle-class families an extra $2,798, while the 3.7 percent gain by the top 5 percent brought those households an additional $7,656 each. What’s more, the household earnings of those rich families were up 6 percent over their pre-recession earnings in 2007, whereas the earnings of the bottom 60 percent of households remain lower today than they were in 2007. (Scroll over the chart below to see the dollar amounts.)

America’s poorest got a lift: Though 43 million people remained in poverty in 2015, including 14.5 million children, America’s poorest saw their biggest gains since 1968, an indication that job growth is reaching the bottom rung. “When jobs become available, the penetration of work into the poorest of the poor is really deep,” Kathryn Edin, a sociology professor at Johns Hopkins University and co-author of the book $2 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America. “You’re not going to get out of poverty if you’re not working full time.” Last year, the US economy gained more than 2.6 million jobs, the second-highest increase since 1999.

Meanwhile, the number of people living in poverty dropped by 3.5 million, falling from a bit under 15 percent in 2014 to 13.5 percent in 2015, the largest dip since 1967. More than 8 million families were in poverty last year, down from 9.5 million in 2014. And the number of children under 18 dropped by 1 million. For the first time, the Census Bureau also calculated poverty rates based on people’s actual take-home income—taking into account tax credits and government subsidies such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. (The poverty rate is normally calculated based on pre-tax income only.) And while more than 2 million additional Americans were impoverished based on the alternate calculation, 3 million children fell out of poverty.

U.S. Census Bureau

City dwellers got an economic boost, but rural America remained stagnant: Twenty-three states saw declines in their poverty rates. Mississippi maintained the nation’s most impoverished state, with 22 percent living in poverty, while New Hampshire saw the lowest rate—8 percent.

U.S. Census Bureau

Much of the economic growth was confined to cities, however. Household incomes in cities within metropolitan areas grew 7.3 percent and poverty rates dropped. Rural dwellers—those outside the Census’ metropolitan areas—saw a 2 percent decline in median household income, and about the same rate of poverty as city dwellers.

U.S. Census Bureau

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate