Share of Americans With Health Insurance Declined in 2018

Now, with the unemployment rate near a five-decade low, household income gains must rely more heavily on raises for existing employees, said Ernie Tedeschi, an economist at Evercore ISI.

At an individual level, pay did climb by some measures. Among full-time, year-round workers, inflation-adjusted earnings rose more than 3 percent for both men and women.

And as some workers take home fatter paychecks, it is helping to even out inequality, if only slightly. Incomes grew more for poorer households last year, adjusted for household size. Poverty fell for households with children headed by women, and the black poverty rate was the lowest ever reported — though it is still more than double the white poverty rate.

There has been a “theme of the recovery finally seeping down to the most marginal workers and families in America,” and “you see that in 2018,” Mr. Tedeschi said.

The report’s income statistics are pretax, so they do not directly reflect Mr. Trump’s tax cut package, which took effect last year. The Tax Foundation has estimated that richer households probably saw the greatest decrease in taxes because of the changes.

A separate report this week, from the Government Accountability Office, found that wealthy Americans were far more likely to live to old age than their poorer neighbors. Other recent research has found that gap has been growing.

Altogether, 38 million people were living in poverty. The poverty rate has fallen relatively steadily since 2010, when it topped 15 percent. Among children, the poverty rate was 16.2 percent, also down from 2017.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/10/business/economy/health-insurance-poverty-rate-census.html?emc=rss&partner=rss