Regular readers are aware that life for middle-class Americans under the Biden administration has been a constant - and consistent - descent into economic hell, courtesy of real incomes declining every single month since the end of the Trump administration, when inflation exploded wiping out all nominal wage gains since 2020.
Today, the Census Bureau made sure that everyone else knows as well, when it reported that inflation-adjusted household incomes in the US decreased 2.3% in 2022 from a year earlier, the third year in a row of declining real incomes, highlighting the toll of higher cost of living for American families.
The median income last year was $74,580 compared with $76,330 in 2021, $76,660 in 2020 and $78,250 in 2019, according to the Census Bureau’s annual report on income, poverty and health insurance coverage.
Tuesday's data cements the devastating legacy of the economic farce known as "Bidenomics", where an explosive surge in inflation and debt have not only crushed real incomes and crippled what's left of America's middle class, but the resulting $33 trillion in debt has doomed future generations of Americans and triggered the beginning of the end of the US dollar as the world's reserve currency.
But wait, there's more, because like everything else under the Biden administration's favorite trope of divisive identity politics, race had a huge impact on the latest household income numbers too. See if you can spot it from the chart below.
Don't see it? Maybe this version will make it more obvious:
If it's still unclear, while median real incomes for Black and Hispanic households rose modestly, those of White Americans saw one of their biggest drops in recent history. This is how the Census Bureau described it:
White and non-Hispanic White households experienced a decrease in real median income between 2021 and 2022 (3.5 percent and 3.6 percent, respectively). The real median incomes for Black, Asian, and Hispanic households were not statistically different from 2021. Asian households had the highest median income ($108,700) in 2022, followed by non-Hispanic Whites ($81,060) and Hispanics ($62,800). Black households had the lowest median income ($52,860).
The real median incomes of different groups can be compared by calculating the ratio of the median income of a specific group to the median income of non-Hispanic White households. For 2022, the ratio of Asian to non-Hispanic White household income was 1.34. In other words, the median income for Asian households was 1.34 times higher than the median income for non-Hispanic White households. This ratio was not statistically different from 2021. The ratio to non-Hispanic White households increased in 2022 for both Black and Hispanic households, from 0.62 to 0.65 and 0.74 to 0.77, respectively. This means that the gaps in median income between these groups and non-Hispanic White households decreased.
There was another surprise in the data: readers may recall that since the covid crash, it has been just foreign-born workers that have seen job gains, while native-born workers have been stagnant at best; in August, this trend blew up with 1.2 million native-born workers losing their jobs and replaced by 668K foreign-born workers.
Not surprisingly, this divergence between a labor market that is extremely hospitable to foreign-born workers and hostile to domestic-born workers has also extended to incomes, with native-born households watching their inflation-adjusted incomes sliding 2.5% in 2022, while foreign-born workers saw a modest 0.2% increase.
There is much more in the full report, and none of it is even remotely supportive of the lie that Bidenomics has been a success. No matter how one spins the data, one thing is clear: the standard of living of most Americans - and especially white, middle-class households - has deteriorated every year under Biden, offset by tiny improvements for Hispanics and Blacks. Almost as if that has been the agenda of Biden's puppetmasters all along...
