Americans are getting poorer.

If you are a Democrat, this is how you build back better.

The (very unsurprising) news comes from Joe Biden’s Census Department, so it’s hard to spin this as Republicans making stuff up. Before taxes are taken into account median income fell by 2.3%.

#BREAKING: Median household income fell by 2.3% in 2022 on an inflation-adjusted basis, the Census Bureau reported Tuesday.https://t.co/IoO0N4mnha

— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) September 12, 2023

The Democrats have been furiously spinning the economic data to claim that the American economy is roaring, but both our day-to-day experience and the economic statistics are telling a vastly different story. Inflation makes the raw numbers look one way while the underlying reality is something very different.

Median household incomes peaked at $78,250 in 2019, the year before the pandemic. They declined in 2022 to $74,580, a year that saw inflation soar, undercutting household purchasing power.

“Despite nominal gains, historically high inflation resulted in a decline in real median household income,” said Liana Fox, assistant division chief for economic characteristics in the Census Bureau’s Social, Economic, and Housing Statistics Division.

The figures released on Tuesday showed that poverty was flat, with about 11.5% of the population, or 38 million people, below the poverty line, which was $29,678 for a family of four.

The bureau also reported a jump in child poverty by one metric, the supplemental poverty measure, or SPM, from 5.2% to 12.4%. The increase was attributable in large part to the expiration of the temporary expanded child tax credit implemented by Democrats and President Joe Biden as a form of pandemic relief. The SPM, unlike the official poverty measure, includes tax credits in calculating household resources.

But wait, there’s more. And the news is actually much worse than the top line number of 2.3%. Median income after taxes fell almost 9%!

Real median household income after taxes fell 8.8% to $64,240 from 2021 to 2022 and the poverty rate after taxes as measured by the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) increased 59% to 12.4%.

These significant changes in after-tax income and poverty rates of U.S. households were much larger than the annual changes in before-tax income and poverty, according to U.S. Census Bureau data released today.

The Census Bureau reports, Income in the United States: 2022 and Poverty in the United States: 2022, show that before taxes, median household income declined 2.3% to $74,580 and the poverty rate (11.5%), as measured by the official poverty measure, was not statistically different from 2021.

This dramatic difference can be attributed to key changes in federal tax policy.

In 2022, several policies enacted by the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) expired, including an expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) for filers without children and full refundability of the Child Tax Credit (CTC) and Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit (CDCTC). ARPA also increased the maximum amount of CTC.

In 2020 and 2021, most households also received Economic Impact Payments (EIP) that were no longer issued in 2022.

The rollback of these tax policies had the largest effect on post-tax income among the nation’s lowest-income households.

The Biden Administration has poured trillions of dollars into the economy in a vain attempt to make inherently inefficient economic activity appear to be wise; the inevitable result has been a decline in the real purchasing power of the dollar and an economy pouring resources into irrational activities.

Add to those problems the artificially induced increases in the price of energy and shortages of vital products and things have gotten worse for average Americans.

Now add in that Biden (and before him, Trump in 2020) were sending out checks backed by funny money to lower income people and that the programs to do so have expired, and lower-income people are getting royally screwed.

Of course, the people who are getting paid to do inefficient things like build solar and wind energy projects are doing better, which has always been the point. Build Back Better has always been about taking money from people Biden doesn’t care for or about and giving it to those he does.

The elite class–who are doing just fine, thank you–keep telling us that Biden just has to tout his exceptional economic policies more. Americans just need to be told endlessly that the economy is working for them.

Well, the economy isn’t working for average people. It’s working for the elites and just about nobody else.

An 8.8% drop in median income in just one year is a staggering blow for most people. And for the people who are thinking of moving the blow would be even worse–housing prices as a percentage of income are at all time highs, making housing the most expensive it has ever been in US history.

Biden’s economy is the worst we have seen in decades, and unlike the Carter years the president shows no sign of taking action to set the economy right. As bad as Carter was he took steps to loosen the stranglehold government policies had put on the economy, beginning with deregulation. Biden is going in the opposite direction.

Biden’s motto is worse than the WEF’s: You will own nothing and be unhappy.