'90s Boom Had Broad Impact; 2000 Census Cites Income Growth Among Poor, Upper Middle Class
The economic boom of the 1990s raised the incomes of the poorest Americans, held the size of the middle class steady and swelled the ranks of those with six-digit incomes, according to census data released yesterday.</br></br>The figures confirm a long-term momentum that has given millions of Americans significantly more income: since 1980, the share of the U.S. population earning more than $100,000 annually has doubled, after adjusting for inflation. That upward income mobility was so broad that, when the census was taken two years ago, 5 out of 6 Americans lived in counties in which the lowest niches -- those with incomes of less than $15,000 -- were shrinking.</br></br>But there were notable exceptions, places where the middle class shrank while the ranks of the rich and poor expanded. They included a swath of major metropolitan areas from Washington through Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York, as well as large parts of Southern California.</br></br>Poverty may have grown in those areas because of high numbers of immigrants from poor countries, experts say, or in some cases, an ailing local economy.</br></br>"It's a positive picture overall," said John Logan, a sociology professor at the State University of New York in Albany, who compiled his own study of census data for metropolitan areas.