MOSCOW, September 30 (RIA Novosti) - US workers saw no wage growth over the last 40 years, suggests the data, released in the latest report by US Census Bureau on income and poverty in the United States.
According to the report, median full-time male worker earned $50,033 in 2013, which is almost similar to the inflation-adjusted figure of $48,639 in 1983 and about 5 percent less than the peak figure of $52,421 that the US worker got to bring home in 1973. From 1974 to 2013, median earnings of a male worker fluctuated from $47,521 to $51,509 per year.
Commenting on these figures, Laura Tyson, a former chair of the US President’s Council of Economic Advisers and a professor at Berkeley, called the real-wage stagnation for most of US workers “one of the United States’ defining - and disheartening - economic trends over the last 40 years,” in her article on World Economic Forum website.
Another major and well-known problem of the US economy is its stunning inequality. According to the US Census Bureau’ report, from 1979 to 2012, real wages climbed 154 percent for the top one percent of wage earners and 39 percent for the top five percent, while stagnating for the bottom 20 percent and falling for the bottom tenth of workers.
The report also showed that even though there have been a slight improvement in comparison with the years 2010-2012, in 2013 14.5 percent of Americans lived below the poverty line – as opposed to 12.5 percent in 2007, the year before the most recent recession. Real median household income in 2013 was 8 percent lower than in 2007.
