Census: Household incomes holding steady

Tim Mullaney | USA TODAY

Americans' household incomes still haven't caught up to where they were before the recession, but they've stopped losing ground to inflation, the Census Bureau said Tuesday.

Median household incomes after inflation stabilized in 2012, following two annual declines, the bureau reported. Adjusted for inflation, median household income was $51,017 last year, not statistically different from the 2011 median of $51,100. The median is the point where half are below and half are above.

The report paints a picture of an economy that has absorbed the impact of the 2008 financial crisis, but has not yet recovered from the damage, said Sheldon Danziger, president of the Russell Sage Foundation. Inflation-adjusted household incomes are 8.3% below their cyclical peak in 2007, and even further below their all-time peak in 1999, according to the Census.

"Poverty is higher today than it was in 2000, and household incomes are lower,'' Danziger said. "The 'lost decade' is likely to turn into 'two lost decades.'"

Compared with recent annual reports from the Census, this year's reported few dramatic changes, said David Johnson, chief of the bureau's social, economic and housing statistics division.

The sharpest change was in the percentage of Americans without health insurance, which dropped by 0.3 percentage points to 15.4%. The decline was almost entirely accounted for by broader Medicare coverage, with almost no change in Americans' coverage by private health insurance, the report said. Medicare's change is mostly a function of more Baby Boomers becoming eligible for Medicare as they turn 65, Johnson said.

But the number of people without insurance coverage, 48.0 million, was not statistically different than in 2011 because of population growth, Johnson said.

The official poverty rate showed no statistical difference, for the second year in a row, staying at 15%, representing 46.5 million Americans living below the poverty line. That's up 2.5 percentage points from 2007, before the recession.

From 2009 through 2011,about 31.6% of the population lived in poverty for at least two months, while just 3.5% of Americans were poor for all 36 of those months.

The report touched on a number of hot-button issues about incomes, insurance and poverty.

Income inequality changed little during the year, Johnson said. Families needed to earn $191,200 to make it into the top 5% of top-earning households, and about $146,000 to enter the top 10%.

Inequality has risen sharply over the last several years. A broad measure of income inequality used by the Census Bureau has risen 2% since 2009 and 3% in the last decade.

The wage gap between men and women remained unchanged, with women earning 77% of what men do. The gaps were smaller among younger groups of workers, the Census Bureau said,

"For women and their families, it's the same old story — another year of no improvement,'' said Linda Hallman, executive director of the American Association of University Women. "Women working full time in the United States are still paid only 77% of what men are paid, just as they were a decade ago.''

The report also showed that insurance coverage has risen sharply since 2010 among groups that benefit from the Affordable Care Act. Uninsured rates dropped among children, whose eligibility for publicly supported insurance was expanded, and young adults, who can now remain on their parents' coverage until they are 26.

But both groups showed little year-over-year change in their insurance rates in 2012, Johnson said.