September 12, 2018

Average Household Income Was Up 1.8 Percent Last Year

The Census Bureau brings some good news today: median household income rose 1.8 percent last year:

It only took 18 years, but household income is now firmly higher than it was at the top of the dotcom boom. On the other hand, low-income earners didn’t do so well:

The income of the bottom fifth increased only half a percent, and the income of the second fifth increased slightly more than 1 percent. Neither one has yet made up the ground they’ve lost since the peak of the dotcom boom. Maybe next year.

The Census Bureau released a bunch of other stuff today too, including poverty and income inequality numbers. I’ll try to get to those later.

DOES IT FEEL LIKE POLITICS IS AT A BREAKING POINT?

Headshot of Editor in Chief of Mother Jones, Clara Jeffery

It sure feels that way to me, and here at Mother Jones, we’ve been thinking a lot about what journalism needs to do differently, and how we can have the biggest impact.

We kept coming back to one word: corruption. Democracy and the rule of law being undermined by those with wealth and power for their own gain. So we're launching an ambitious Mother Jones Corruption Project to do deep, time-intensive reporting on systemic corruption, and asking the MoJo community to help crowdfund it.

We aim to hire, build a team, and give them the time and space needed to understand how we got here and how we might get out. We want to dig into the forces and decisions that have allowed massive conflicts of interest, influence peddling, and win-at-all-costs politics to flourish.

It's unlike anything we've done, and we have seed funding to get started, but we're looking to raise $500,000 from readers by July when we'll be making key budgeting decisions—and the more resources we have by then, the deeper we can dig. If our plan sounds good to you, please help kickstart it with a tax-deductible donation today.

Thanks for reading—whether or not you can pitch in today, or ever, I'm glad you're with us.

Signed by Clara Jeffery

Clara Jeffery, Editor-in-Chief

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