Incomes beat inflation by a lot in 2023, and many are now better off than the Trump years

Now that Republicans are losing ground in the election, and are the party stuck with the tired old man as a candidate, they’re trying anything to gain an upper hand on Democrats. And if it’s not flat-out racism and xenophobia, their other strategy is to complain about prices being higher than they were under Trump.

Of course that’s true, but as Paul Krugman reminds us, prices have generally gone up under every president in the last 100 years - with one exception that we do not want to repeat.

Another thought for people complaining that inflation may be down, but prices are still high: over the past century, only one president has presided over a significant fall in consumer prices. His name was Herbert Hoover. pic.twitter.com/QpiWBpXQje

— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) September 16, 2024

The real question is whether it is easier for most people to make ends meet now compared to the pre-COVID times. And generally, I think the answer is yes.

We got more proof of this with the release of the Census Bureau’s annual report on US household incomes last week. These numbers are adjusted for inflation to reflect 2023’s dollars, and it showed that for the typical American household, a lot of the COVID-related losses of 2020 and the inflation-related setbacks of 2021 and 2022 were recovered in the last year.

Median household income was $80,610 in 2023, 4.0 percent higher than the 2022 estimate of $77,540…This is the first annual increase in median household income since 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic began. The 2023 median household income is not statistically different from the 2019 median household income of $81,210. Household income in 2019 was the highest since 1967, the highest ever recorded in this report.

even more interesting is that the largest inflation-adjusted gains in 2023 came to the Americans at the lowest income levels. And with a big jump in asset prices, the richest Americans gained a slightly higher percentage of income than the median US household.

The median represents the midpoint of the household income distribution. Changes in income at other points in the income distribution provide additional information about the economic well-being of households above or below the median. Household income rose across the income distribution. Household income at the 10th percentile increased 6.7 percent between 2022 and 2023, and household income at the 50th and 90th percentiles increased 4.0 percent and 4.6 percent, respectively. Household income also increased at all other deciles between 2022 and 2023. This indicates that income increased at the bottom, middle, and top of the income distribution in 2023.

While most income levels weren’t entirely all the way back to inflation-adjusted 2019 levels at the end of last year, most of the lowest 30% of earners were, and the rest wasn’t too far behind.

I am also pretty sure the gains in inflation-adjusted household income have continued in 2024, as inflation has continued to level off, and real average hourly earnings are up nearly 0.8% so far this year. So as we stand today, it’s likely that a majority of the bottom half of income earners in America are now making more than they did in 2019, even after inflation.

As for the upper earners that are still behind on the income side, those people are likely to have benefitted the most from the 15% increase in US household wealth that has happened since. And they’ve likely not had to deal with as much inflation as the nation as a whole, as they spend a lower share of their dollars on food and were more likely to have locked in a low-interest mortgage on a home, limiting the impact of higher home prices.

But I watch Republican ads that make it seem like it’s still 2022 and that most people are still falling behind. I don’t think that’s true, and while unemployment has risen a bit in the last year, 4.2% is still a historically low number. There are also 6.2 million more jobs in America than we had at the end of 2019, even if you assume the downward revision of 818,000 jobs that was revealed in the last month.

In another one of those Census reports, we found that the percentage of Americans that don't have health insurance are as low as it was during Trump's "greatest economy ever" (8.0% uninsured in both 2019 and 2023), which translates to another 7 million Americans with health insurance compared to 2019. Yet Trump doesn’t offer much more than the GOP’s dream of leaving more Americans vulnerable and at the mercy of health insurance companies and employers when it comes to their benefits.

(Wait, Trump says he has the “concepts of a plan” on health care that will be revealed at some later point. This guy was in the White House for 4 years and has been running for President for the last 9 years)

Knowing these numbers and looking out at how people are living in this country, it makes the GOP's attempts to create a 2022-era theme of "Americans are in hard times due to Biden-Harris inflation" seem like desperate bullshit. Not only is inflation significantly down and incomes significantly up from 2 years ago, but we have a more robust safety net that has gotten more people to have health insurance. And in addition, Kamala Harris and the Dems are the only candidates that have solutions such as breaking up monopolies, increasing competition, and reducing our energy consumption that help to reduce the prices that Americans pay.

Republicans like to complain, but they never offer any answers for Americans' concerns besides yelling about "scary dark-skinned people". Beyond that, all if I've found when it comes to a plan to roll back prices is...