this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2024
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Edit: there is a huge caveat in my post which is I missed that these are household numbers, not individual numbers.
That would be amazing if it were true, but it's not. In 2022 the median income in USA was over $74k
Source: https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2023/demo/p60-279.html / https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/demo/tables/p60/279/tableA1.xlsx
Reminder that median means "half of the samples are above this point and half of the samples are below, which means exactly what was stated in the OP "half of America"
I fully support the ideas from OP that corporations need to pay people better and wages need to at least attempt to track economic gains, but we can send that message while telling the truth and citing our sources to prove that the message is legit.
That's "Household income". Household income is the most useless and skewed statistic I can think of when it comes to equality and actual income per person.
In my mind rich people can afford to live in different homes. Poor people can not afford to do so. That means if 8 poor people who each make eg 10k a year share a household then their household earns 80k. Now if 8 less-poor people who each make eg 40k a year are split over four households then their households also make 80k each.
So now there's 4 households of 2 people each that make as much as 1 household of 8 people. Here statistically 100% of households make exactly 40k. Regardless 50% of those 16 people still make less than 35k a year.
In reality people inside one household have different incomes, which means even among the 4 slightly richer households in the example above some inhabitants would probably make less than 35k.
One question I have is how do household-statistics count people who have multiple houses? If a rich person owns 10 houses, then does it count as 10 households who earn >35k?
People with multiple homes typically have one home that counts as their residency and those living in that house count as a household.
Other homes are secondary or recreational homes and are not counted to have residents.
Sometimes, rich people will claim to live in one home in a low income tax jurisdiction, while actually spending more time in a high income tax jurisdiction. This is tax fraud and the most recent famous case I can think of is Shakira.
Alright that makes sense. Is there any benefit to living together vs living alone as far as taxes are concerned? I suppose a couple owning two houses and each person claiming to live in a different house (ie two households) would still skew statistics - especially a median.
It depends on jurisdiction.
In most countries, living together has a slight tax advantage. In some countries it has a disadvantage.
Fantastic points! I totally missed that household part of it and I agree that judging based off household is a really distorted view of individual financial position.
Do you have data on individual incomes?
I don't have any data. My goal was not to provide data but to call out the absurdness of creating statistics for abstract things like household incomes.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA646N
To think of household income, think of how you file taxes. You don't claim roommates in your taxes, theyre not your household. If you and a significant other file jointly, that's your household.
The stat isn't as ridiculous as the other person claims
[email protected] posted the definitions used in the census survey above
Household income doesn't mean you and all your roommates. If you're single and you have 3 roommates, your household is still just you for the purpose of calculating household income. If two families share a house, then each respective family has their own household income.
So what about young adults who can't afford their own house and live with their parents or some other relatives? Are they excluded from these statistics? Do they count as a household consisting of only one person? Are they completely ignored in this statistics?
The PDF itself doesn't specify these things. Nor does it confirm your claim. Maybe some of the data referred to in the many footnotes does. Wikipedia and Google results didn't really answer those questions either, they only confirmed that there are many different ways to model a household.
Where did you hear this brother?
https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cps/technical-documentation/subject-definitions.html#household
For the census, perhaps. Not for tax purposes.
That's adding to the confusion and seems like a weird gotcha, we're talking about the census as the person posted above as a source. The people who are confused and wrong seem to be stuck on tax filing status for some reason, I'm hoping obfuscation isn't the goal.
Where did anyone get the idea that the statistic cited in the OP comes from the census?
...I'm going to lean on the side of this being trolling unless you're just lost or not following the full conversation. We are in a comment chain discussing what [email protected] replied to OP with. No one is implying the OP image is census data, people are using the census data to dispute the OP image's claims. I feel breaking it down further is redundant since you can just scroll back up and read all the replies.
For some reason I’ve been accused of being a troll and being deluded because I said it makes more sense to define household the way the IRS does, and I was told no, it’s about the census. At this point my interpretation is no of here really has a clue what they’re taking about at all. Thanks for the sideways insults though.
Thanks for that, it really helps clearing things up!
It does! And one billionaire with a ~~wife~~ live-in sex worker (remember; they cannot love) erases thousands of dual-income partners living in poverty
Are you sure that it does? Some other people are claiming that it does not and I honestly have no idea who is correct. Do you have a source for this?
Okay so here's what I remember from 4th grade (salt it heavily; that was decades ago and I had to flake on statistics class):
There are 3 kinds of 'average': The mean: values of all the things added together, divided by number of things
Median: take the... I think the mean, but maybe highest and lowest, then find the actual number in the data set closest to it
Mode: number that occurs most often in the data set.
Pretty sure this uses mean. That's the common one. Look what happens to that data when you remove extreme outliers, or just the top 1%.
The median net compensation for American workers in 2019 was $34,248.45, which is less than $35,000. So, the claim in the screenshot is apparently accurate for individuals. Granted, household income is a better indication of socioeconomic standing for people with spouses.
Source?
OP is off by $5k according to this: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA646N Median personal income hit $40k in 2022.
EDIT: I wasn't suggesting that $5k difference is enough to invalidate OPs point. $40k is obviously ridiculously low.
That's from when Trump was president, it's $CURRENT_YEAR, for God's sake
/* Ignore my other comment if it’s not deleted for you yet *
This is specifically for combined household rate, which is different from individual earnings in that, well, it’s for two people and not a measure of how much the “average” American makes
My guess is they included children, who earn nothing, to get the average down that low
Maybe, but that would also be dishonest, because nobody is asking children why they are not having kids and not buying homes.
Oh I agree. They started with a premise and went about getting the numbers to match it, which is at best lousy journalism. I'm just theorizing about their methodology.