Jobs and poverty

The Census report of September 2016 has some interesting findings:  working decreases poverty! Jobs increase household income! Crazy as it may be from all the talk about income gaps and why we need more government assistance for victim groups, adding 2.4 million full time paid people (aka workers) to the payroll, reduced poverty and raised household income.  But also, not reported in the summary is that incomes of Hispanic households rose at a higher rate than white, black and Asian, and real median income of households maintained by a foreign-born person increased by 5.3 percent, while the median income of households maintained by a native-born person increased only by 4.4 percent.  Do you suppose that might cause some hard feelings among the "privileged" whites who are supposed to have all those advantages or black households who've been waiting for hope and change?

Summary of findings:
• Real median household income increased 5.2 percent between 2014 and 2015. This is the first annual increase in median household income since 2007.
• The number of full-time, yearround workers increased by 2.4 million in 2015.
• The official poverty rate decreased by 1.2 percentage points between 2014 and 2015.
• The number of people in poverty fell by 3.5 million between 2014 and 2015.

But for all the talk we hear about poverty from academe, from media, from government, I was shocked to read that chronic poverty rate, for 2009-2012, 48 months, was 2.4%. The other figure you see is people who fall into poverty for short periods of time.

And it's a funny thing about graphs, it's very clear in this report that after the most recent recession was over (June 2009) incomes continued to fall, where as if you look at the others  (1961, 1970, 1975, 1983-84, 1991, 2001) they either rose or flattened out, they didn't fall.

And what else?  The household income of a married couple in 2015 was about $85,000 and a single female household was $38,000. Marriage decreases the poverty rate for children. For related children in married-couple families, 9.8 percent and 4.8 million were in poverty in 2015, down from 10.6 percent and 5.2 million in 2014. For related children in families with a female householder, 42.6 percent and 7.9 million were in poverty in 2015, down from 46.5 percent and 8.5 million in 2014.

Income and Poverty in the United States 2015. https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2016/demo/p60-256.pdf