Census Report Shows Income Stagnation Under Democrats

The Census Bureau has released its annual income and poverty report for 2013. You can read it here. Not much changed last year–which, actually, should be a major news story. At a time when we should be experiencing rapid growth coming out of a recession, incomes continue to stagnate:

Median household income was $51,939 in 2013, not statistically different in real terms from the 2012 median of $51,759. This is the second consecutive year that the annual change was not statistically significant, following two consecutive years of annual declines in median household income.

In 2013, real median household income was 8.0 percent lower than in 2007, the year before the most recent recession.

Democrats love to talk about the middle class, because it distracts attention from how bad their policies have been for ordinary Americans. This graph, showing median household income in constant dollars from 1967 through 2013, tells the story. Click to enlarge:

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When you have slow-growth policies, you will get slow growth. When you have slow growth, incomes stagnate or even decline. That is pretty much the story of the Obama years.

One other interesting sidelight in the report:

The real median income of households maintained by a non-citizen increased by 6.0 percent between 2012 and 2013.

As opposed to no statistically significant increase for citizens. I am not sure what this means; non-citizens were starting from a lower base. Still, the difference is striking.

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