LETTER FROM NEW YORK
One year before the presidential election, statistics published Tuesday September 12 by the US Census Bureau are very bad for Democratic President Joe Biden: the median pre-tax salary of Americans fell by 2.3% in 2022 to fall to 74,580 dollars (69,301 euros). Compared to 2019, the last “normal” year of Donald Trump’s mandate and a historic record, the decline reached 4.7%. Explanation: despite an increase in their nominal wages, Americans are hit by inflation, triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic and budgetary and monetary support plans. Since Joe Biden took office in January 2021, prices have increased by 17% in the United States. “American income falls for the third year in a row”title it Wall Street Journal.
The figure is even more catastrophic if we take the income after taxes and tax credits, the Covid tax aid having disappeared: there, the drop in income reached on average 8.8% in 2022, falling to 64 $240, the Census Bureau reveals. The Covid subsidies, decided under both Donald Trump and Joe Biden, had created a windfall effect and led to a temporary explosion in the savings rate of Americans.
Second bomb, the poverty rate after transfers and adjusted according to the cost of living in the different regions of the United States exploded, going from 7.8% to 12.4%. This poverty, which only affected 25.6 million Americans, now affects 40.9 million people and hits children hard, with a rate rising from 5.2% to 12.4%. Once again, the comparison with the Trump era is painful, since this figure is higher than the 38.3 million in 2019. The poverty rate is rebounding due to the end of the exceptional aid programs put in place during the pandemic, but also because the cost of living has increased significantly.
Biden blames Republicans
As a result, the poverty threshold was increased by around 10%: a family of four renting their home was considered poor if the family income was less than $34,518 in 2022, compared to 31,453 in 2021. The absolute poverty rate and before tax transfers is stable at 11.5%, but this old measurement is little commented on, because, as the New York Timesshe is “widely considered obsolete because it excludes many of the most important government anti-poverty programs.”
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