Chart of the Day: Household Income Finally Beats 1999 Record

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The Census Bureau has finally gotten around to calculating household income for 2016, and the news is good: adjusted for inflation, income was up 3.2 percent last year. In fact, household income is now at an all-time high:

And now for the buzzkill portion of this post: this means household income has increased a whopping 0.6 percent since 1999. That’s $22 per year.

On the other hand, this is better than the top .01 percent has done. According to Piketty and Saez, their income peaked in 2000 and is down 4 percent through 2015 (with some spikes in between). Will 2016 be the year that they too beat their 20th century high? P&S take even longer than the Census Bureau to make their calculations, so we’ll have to wait and see. But I’ll bet they do.

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In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

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