May 30, 2016
Robert Samuelson says it does, using his column, “Good News for the Middle Class,” to highlight the findings of the Fed’s Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households in 2015. For Samuelson, the big news is that 69?percent of households said they were “living comfortably” or “doing okay,” up from 62 percent in 2013.
Okay, that one is clearly going in the right direction, although this is not terribly surprising given that we are two years further along in a recovery, which now has a respectable rate of job growth. But this aside, it is hard to view much of the other information in the report as being very positive.
For example, the report finds that:
“Twenty-two percent of employed adults indicate that they are either working multiple jobs, doing informal work for pay in addition to their main job, or both.”
“Thirty-one percent of non-retired respondents report that they have no retirement savings or pension at all, including 27 percent of non-retired respondents age 60 or older.”
“Forty-six percent of adults say they either could not cover an emergency expense costing $400, or would cover it by selling something or borrowing money.”
None of these findings look like good news to me. Samuelson does note the last one on the ability to cover emergency expenses, but strangely tells readers:
“…almost 30 percent of respondents said they’d have trouble covering an unanticipated expense of $400.”
The 46 percent figure is in the executive summary.
Some other items that folks may find interesting:
“Just 16 percent of young adults (ages 25 to 34) whose parents both have only a high-school degree or less completed a bachelor’s degree, whereas 65 percent of young adults with a parent who completed a bachelor’s degree have completed one themselves.”
This is certainly not a very good story on mobility.
And finally one about the future:
“Twenty-three percent of respondents expect their income to be higher in the year after the survey, down from 29 percent who expected income growth in the year after the 2014 survey.”
That one doesn’t look great. People’s ability to see the economy’s future tends not to be very good (probably because they mostly get information from reading what economists say), but this certainly does not suggest optimism about their economic prospects. On net, I don’t know if the picture here is good news, but I suppose we can say that it could be worse.
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