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The U.S. Census Bureau recently published a report on the economic health of Americans. Surprisingly, it paints a mostly rosy picture. Household incomes in the United States are up. Job postings are at an all time high, and poverty is down.

U.S. incomes rose for the second year in a row, by 3.2% from 2015 to 2016. The official poverty rate declined .8%, also the second of a two-year decline.

The Great Recession in 2007 devastated Americans' incomes and savings. The recent rise in average income represents the biggest economic gains U.S. households have made since then.

Additionally, from 2015 to 2016, the percentage of Americans with healthcare for all or part of the year inched up .3% to 91.2%. Two thirds of Americans continue to receive insurance form their employer rather than the government.

What Determines Income?

The study looked at numerous measures of wealth such as age and education. Household incomes, it turns out, are tightly tied to these types of factors. Unsurprisingly, higher earners are more likely to be employed full-time, well educated and married. On the other hand, lower-income earners tend to be less educated, only work part-time, and be single.

Mark Perry, writing for the American Enterprise Institute, saw many reasons to be optimistic. "The good news is that the key demographic factors that explain differences in household income are not fixed over our lifetimes and are largely under our control," Perry writes.

In other words, earners are not destined to remain in any one particular income bracket. If anything, earners tend to follow a path. The younger and more inexperienced they are, the less they make. As people acquire more skills expertise, their incomes rise, lifting them into different levels of wealth. As people make their way into retirement, incomes naturally shrink as they drop out of the work force.

Certain Gaps Remain

Although this is indeed all good news, there are some nagging inequalities among poor and certain middle class groups. Adjusting for inflation, the average income for men working full-time has actually declined from $54,030 in 1973 to $51,640 in 2016.

African Americans are the only racial group that is economically worse off in 2016 than in 2000, according to the Census Bureau data. The poverty rate within the African American community is still twice that of whites. Even so, African American still incomes rose 6% in 2016.

Meanwhile in Washington, tax cuts seem to be next on the legislative agenda. Speaking last week in North Dakota, President Trump said that "our painful tax system has become a massive barrier to America’s economic comeback." Yet with another debt ceiling approaching in three months, it's difficult to see where this highly-partisan Congress will find room for tackling the tax code.