It’s that time of year again, when the Census Bureau releases its poverty, income, and health-insurance coverage data for 2017. I’ll get a write-up out as soon as I can after the 10am data release, but be forewarned: these data are more complicated and a lot less standardized than, say, the BLS jobs data. So, it will take a few hours to chew through them. For what it’s worth, which isn’t much, as recent survey changes make these data tough to accurately forecast, my predictions are that poverty fell half a point last year (from 12.7% to 12.2%) and real median household income grew about 1.7%. If so, both changes would be statistically significant gains. But they would be smaller gains than the prior two years, and one reason for that, if I’m in the ballpark, will be that inflation was a
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It’s that time of year again, when the Census Bureau releases its poverty, income, and health-insurance coverage data for 2017. I’ll get a write-up out as soon as I can after the 10am data release, but be forewarned: these data are more complicated and a lot less standardized than, say, the BLS jobs data. So, it will take a few hours to chew through them.
For what it’s worth, which isn’t much, as recent survey changes make these data tough to accurately forecast, my predictions are that poverty fell half a point last year (from 12.7% to 12.2%) and real median household income grew about 1.7%. If so, both changes would be statistically significant gains.
But they would be smaller gains than the prior two years, and one reason for that, if I’m in the ballpark, will be that inflation was a bit faster last year (2.1%) compared to 2015 (0.1%) and 2016 (1.3%).
Details to follow tomorrow!
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