Stuck in the Great Recession’s pessimism trap

By Robert J. Samuelson est journaliste et chroniqueur économique pour Newsweek et  le Washington Post. Il est l'auteur de “The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath: The Past and Future of American Affluence” (2008).

As often as not, I devote a column to the Census Bureau’s annual report on “Income, Poverty and Health Insurance Coverage.” It’s a statistical benchmark that traditionally measures our progress — or lack of it — in improving the economic well-being of Americans. But the report for 2010, which was released last week and received a huge amount of coverage, fails miserably. It understates the bad news. Not that the findings are upbeat. Quite the opposite: They’re grim. Median household income (the income precisely in the middle of the distribution) was $49,445, down 6.4 percent from 2007 ($52,823), the recent peak, and the lowest since 1996 ($49,112). Comparable declines have occurred in the past; for example, the drop from 1979 to 1983 was 5.7 percent. All these figures are expressed in inflation-adjusted 2010 dollars. The official poverty rate tells a similar story.

It was 15.1 percent in 2010, meaning that a little more than one-seventh of the population has pretax income under the government poverty line ($22,314 for a four-person household). That’s about three percentage points higher than in 2006 (12.3 percent) and, more tellingly, about 10 million more people: 46.2 million vs. 36.5 million. Depressing.
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