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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: epicure who wrote (28042)	9/6/2006 5:31:48 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 540882

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. -- 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%. ----- 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. ---- 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..." gregmankiw.blogspot.com

To: epicure who wrote (28042)	9/6/2006 6:38:56 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 540882

This isn't a direct reply, it deals with longer term trends not changes from 1999 to 2005 or 2006. - "...The myth of the stagnating middle class: It's true that the middle class is shrinking -- but that's because more families are better off. The share of prime-age adults in households with real incomes above $100,000 rose by 13.1 percentage points from 1979 to 2004. The share of households making less than $75,000 dropped by 14 percent. Fully 41 percent of prime-age American adults are in households with incomes above $75,000. Among married-couple households the picture is even brighter. In 2004, the median income for these households was $70,000, and $78,000 for couples with two earners. I focus on prime-age households (age 25-59), which are 68 percent of the population, because including the very young and the very old distorts the picture of what's really happening with the middle class. Many young workers get paid very little, but few will keep their low salaries as they move up in their careers. Older Americans distort the wage and income picture because they're no longer working. Their incomes may shrink, but their standard of living may not diminish. Indeed, Americans age 55-64 have greater net wealth than any other group. Two final points: even assuming household incomes have risen, isn't it just because wives are working longer and harder? And aren't higher prices eroding the middle-class standard of living? No and no. Wives certainly contribute more to household incomes -- their earnings now make up 30 percent of total earnings for middle-income families. But incomes for everyone except the very poor would have risen even absent longer hours on the job by wives. Holding wives' working hours to their 1979 levels, incomes for married couples have still increased by 4 percent for the 30th income percentile; 9 percent for the 50th; and 22 percent for the 70th. On the question of living standards, the cost of some items, such as housing and health care, have risen much faster than inflation. But other equally important items have not. For example, in 1960, the average family spent 24 percent of its income on food. Today, that percentage is 13 percent, and half of that is on meals eaten out. Finally, despite rising housing prices, homeownership is at record highs even for young adults. ..." prospect.org gregmankiw.blogspot.com