Sorry for doubting, thought it had to be a typo and had to check the source myself.
Sure enough - $25,000.00
An Ever Increasing Divide
By Derek Douglas, Almas Sayeed
September 1, 2006
This week, the U.S. Census Bureau released the national numbers on income, poverty, and health insurance coverage. Coming on the heels of 10 years of Welfare Reform and on the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, much of the Administration's focus has been on the poverty rate that has not changed from last year and the slight increase in median household income. Yet for the 37 million people living below the poverty line - about the size of the state of California - the economic outlook is far from positive. The data points to a growing trend of income inequality between the country's richest families and everyone else, suggesting that the prospect of economic mobility for America's working families is more challenging than ever.
The census figures point to an ever-shrinking middle class. Since 2000, the fraction of American households with incomes between $25,000 and $100,000 a year has declined by 1.3 percentage points, whereas the number of households earning more than $100,000 a year has held steady. So where did this 1.3 percent of households go? Not surprisingly, to the bottom of the income distribution. Specifically, the percentage of American households who earn less than $25,000 a year increased 1.4 percentage points during this same period, which equates to nearly 3.2 million more American households living below the $25,000 threshold in 2005 than in 2000.
Middle class families are not the only ones who have fallen. Even those families already at the bottom of the income distribution (i.e., below the $25,000 threshold) have experienced a decline. The new census figures show that 43 percent of the poor now live at half the poverty line (i.e., "deep poverty"), which, for a family of four means they live on a little less than $10,000 a year. This is a 1 percent increase over 2004, which equates to approximately 300,000 more people living in "deep poverty" in 2005 than the year before. This is also the highest percentage of people living in "deep poverty" on record (the U.S. Census Bureau started collecting this data in 1975).
>snip<
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2006/09/ever_increasing_divide.htmlComplete and absolute disconnect.
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