Politicians celebrate new income data that shows, yet again, we're in trouble

If household income is up, why are Americans still hurting so much?

Earlier this month, government officials hailed the release of data from the U.S. Census Bureau showing that the median household income in 2023 was at $80,610, an increase of 4% from the year prior. But why the celebration?

In the 1990s, a majority of households in the U.S. went from depending on one paycheck to two. In that time, household income has gone up, of course, but there’s more to the story.

Look at this chart, adjusted for inflation:

What it’s showing is that in 1985, before the transition to majority dual income households in the U.S., the median household income was about $60,000 in today’s dollars. Forty years later, household wages are up by a third with twice the labor.

But the argument for why Americans aren’t better off goes beyond the numbers shown here. With the dual income households, families are outsourcing their young children to daycares and schools in numbers never before seen. Divorces are at record highs. The number of Americans who take prescription medication to deal with a mental health diagnosis is in the millions. And on and on. I’ll dig deeper into these stats in later articles, but for now, we’ll focus on income.

The politicians want you to believe that if you’re struggling financially, it’s a) not a reflection of the economy as a whole and b) something that they can fix with a few policy changes here and there. And when their policy proposals fail to pass or they do pass and don’t accomplish anything, they’ll feed you some other lie about what’s really going on.

You might ask, if Americans are hurting so much, why sustain the charade? Simple: Dual income households mean more tax revenue for the government. More tax revenue for the government allows politicians to promise more programs, including childcare centers to watch your kids while you’re at work and prescription drugs to deal with your depression and anxiety from having too little income and too little free time to focus on keeping your family from falling apart.

Also, politicians take in a lot of campaign donations from big businesses, which are more concerned about the availability of workers more than they’re concerned about family structure and overall human happiness.

Politicians are celebrating the most recent income data because they want you to believe it says something significant about their leadership and their policies. And it does. Oh it really does. Just not in the way they want you to fully understand.