The US economy is doing well. It’s a fact. If numbers are anything to go by that is. A recent US Census Bureau Report. 2017 witnessed the highest levels on record of middle class income (to $61,372 for median household – an increase of 1.4 percent from 2016) with a simultaneous decline in national poverty rate (a drop of 2.5% from 2014). Millions of US residents have found jobs again as the deep recession has subsided and thus having two people in a family home work again is a huge contributing factor to these figures.

Caution is still needed however. According to a recent article in The Washington Post debating these figures, there are still many problems:

“While the poverty rate is now at the lowest level since 2006, it is still a full percentage point above the rate in 2000, the last time unemployment was this low… The poverty rates for African-Americans and Hispanics also remain substantially higher than for whites and Asians although the unemployment rates for African-Americans and Hispanics have come down swiftly. Twenty-two percent of African-American households and 19.4 percent of Hispanic households live in poverty compared to 11 percent for whites and 10.1 percent for Asian-Americans, the Census Bureau reported.”

Yet at the end of the day the above figures are still worth celebrating. There is a general consensus that the best way of testing the fiscal status of a typical middle class home is via its median household income. And the Census shows that growth.