Are We Blue? You'd Be Too.

Neil Irwin writes in The New York Times section called The Upshot, about why we all think the U.S. economy bites.

The median American household in 2014 had a lower income, in inflation-adjusted terms, than it did in 2013. The $53,657 the household in the middle of the income distribution earned last year was down 1.5 percent from the year before.

The 2014 real median income number is 6.5 percent below its 2007, pre-crisis level. It is 7.2 percent below the number in 1999.

A middle-income American family, in other words, makes substantially less money in inflation-adjusted terms than it did 15 years ago. And there is no evidence that is reversing. Those families lost ground in 2014.

Stagnant incomes were a problem in 2013. They remained so in 2014. The evidence we have so far suggests nothing about that is changing in 2015. That is the reality shaping the backdrop to the 2016 presidential campaign, the Federal Reserve’s interest rate debates and the dinnertime table conversations about the state of the economies in families across the United States.

Stat 101: the median is that salary above and below which lie 50% of earners. In a ranked population of 100 salaries, it would be that value above which 50 people earned, while the other 50 earned less than that amount. A median is different from a mean; means are influenced by a few extreme values, medians are not.

COTTonLINE wonders how much of this decline is the result of millions of illegal immigrants, almost all of whom are low-skilled people seeking low-paying off-the-books jobs?