Its seems rather inaccurate to me.
Dramatic drops across the whole south (from one coast to the other) and across most of the country (every state and district but 5, and every highly populated state), don't represent how the economy has performed in recent years. I do notice that the data is pulled from the top of the last growth period until 2005. That's probably the most recent data available for the specific stat in question but economic growth has continued since then, and is continuing now. If that's the only fault in the map it would paint a distorted picture but might be literally accurate, but I'm not so sure it is literally accurate. The economy of the Carolinas isn't in the toilet.
An arguments against the data would be that real GDP has grown in those years and in fact has grown for at least 16 consecutive quarters. bea.gov
True GDP and household income aren't exact proxies for each other. But you don't normally see that level of GDP growth while at the same time having such wide spread decline in household income, esp. for a period of years when income disparity has not been increasing.
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Changing from GDP for the nation to Gross State product to get data for individual states -
Go to If you go to bea.gov
and set the following settings
Year: 1999-2005
Industry: Total Gross State Product
Statistic: GSP: chained-dollar
Unit of Measure : Average annual growth
Ranges: 5
Distribution method: Equal Count
Units: Percent
(GSP, total: chained-dollar – Real GSP is an inflation-adjusted measure of gross state product. )
Every state shows personal income as up. North Carolina, which your map shows as down by 11.3% shows as up an average of 2.4% per year, or a total of 14.4%.
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But your map was concerned about income not GDP/GSP so I looked around some more for income stats.
Looking at the "Personal Income and Its Disposition" chart for 1999 to 1Q 2006 shows 1Q 1999 personal income at 7,658.4 billion and 2Q 2006 personal income at 10,900.8 billion. That is apparently not inflation adjusted, and its total not per capita. But I adjusted for inflation (using halfhill.com ) and the later figure represents 9,093.2 billion dollars in 1999 money. That's divided among a slightly greater number of people in 2006 than in 1999 so the per capita increase would be smaller but would still clearly be an increase. Households have decreased in size slowly but not by enough to make a major difference here, after all we are only considering a 6 year period.
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Interestingly the census data don't include EITC income.
"...As far as I can tell, all of this is correct, except the last sentence about the EITC being an anti-poverty tool. Why isn't that last part correct? Because the Census omits the income from the EITC when computing the poverty rate. As a program to reduce measured poverty, the program is, by assumption, doomed to failure.
Of course, this is not really a problem with the EITC but, rather, a problem with the measured poverty rate. It makes no sense to evaluate poverty with a statistic that ignores the effects of one of the largest and most rapidly growing anti-poverty tools we have. But that is what the official statistics do.
The EITC is one reason why many low-income families consume more than they earn (a fact pointed out in the previous post). Government policymakers need to take a long, hard look at how poverty is measured. Meanwhile, journalists need to report the official statistics with a healthy dose of caveats..."
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