2020 incomes, poverty, and health insurance coverage; initial reaction

 The Census Bureau’s reports on income, poverty, and health insurance coverage were released today (September 14, 2021).

Usually, journalists who look at these reports get the story wrong.  I’ve just started exploring the reports, but here are some estimates that got my attention.

1. The collapse in real (inflation adjusted) household incomes was big: a 3.2 percentage decline from 2019 to 2020. But this decline was not felt among African-American households (at least to a statistically significant degree).  It was also not experienced on the East Coast.  The Census Bureau divides the country into four zones: Western, Midwestern, Southern, and Eastern, and the household income declines were measured in the three zones west of the Eastern United States.
2. The decline in labor force participation was also massive. 6.2 million fewer women working full-time year-round and 7.5 million fewer men working year-round full-time.  There were that many temporary or permanent lay-offs due to the Pandemic and measures taken to preserve life during waves of infection.
3. For those who did not get laid off, wages zoomed up.  Those who worked full-time year-round in 2020 earned 6.9% more than did such workers in 2019. I sure wish I had received a 6.9% increase in pay from 2019 to 2020.  
4. Poverty didn’t go up as much as I feared: we were up to 11.4 percent poverty in 2020, compared to 10.5% poverty in 2019. Due to growth in population, that’s 37.2 million people living in poverty in 2020, up from 34 million in 2019. 
5. The trends in being uninsured all year were bad, especially for young adults, but not too terrifically horrible. A little over 14% of the population aged 19-34 years old lives without health insurance. For those aged 65 or over, it’s only 1% who are uninsured (Medicare isn’t really universal). For children (aged birth to 18) the uninsured rate is 5.6%, which shows Medicaid isn’t reaching all the low-income children, or else lots of non-poor families aren’t getting health insurance for their children. 
6. We had 8.6% of the population (28 million persons) without health insurance “at any point during the year” of 2020, the year of a pandemic.  No more of that!  (we need Universal health insurance or a single-payer national health care scheme; either would be better than having 28 million people trying to get by without health insurance). 
7. Median household income was $67,521 for 2020. That’s a decline of 2.9% from 2019 ($69,560), but consumption probably didn’t decline at all, because after taxes and benefits (stimulus checks and unemployment insurance, for example) the actual real median income post-tax (after taking account of the benefits from the CARES Act, CRRSA Act, FFCRA, etc.) increased 4.0%.  The post-tax income index of inequality fell (we became more equal) 3.1% from .442 to .428 (I would like to live in a society as wealthy as ours with a Gini of .33 or slightly lower, so we’re not near that). 
8. The median earning of a year-round full-time worker was $56,287. 
9. There is a helpful chart (figure 7) comparing the start of the Great Recession 2007-2009 to the Pandemic recession 2019-2020. The pandemic had a larger decrease in year-round full-time workers (down 11.5% compared to the great recession of 8.6%), but less of a decline in all workers (down 1.7% compared to 2.4% down in the great recession).  During the Great Recession even full-time year-round workers saw median income declines of 0.6%, whereas during the Pandemic Year, full-time year-round workers saw median incomes increase 6.9%.

A couple charts from the report (like all Federal reports, it is in the public domain):

The post-tax Gini may have declined, but ignoring taxes and income transfers (benefits), inequality was getting worse. Look at that huge loss in shares of aggregate income suffered by the lowest 20% of households.

The decline in poverty enjoyed since 2010-2011 ended in 2020.