With an election looming, even the driest documents can spark fury. Hillary Clinton expressed “outrage” at the news contained in the Census Bureau’s latest report on income, poverty and health insurance in the United States, which was released on August 28^th reports the Economist. Barack Obama said it represented “a betrayal of the ideals we hold as Americans”. John Edwards, reviving a well-worn theme, said it confirmed that there are “two Americas”. To anyone not running for president, however, the report contained both good news and bad.

The good news is that the average American is a little better off, and the proportion of Americans who are poor has dwindled a little. Real median household income rose by 0.7% from 2005 to 2006, to $48,201. And the official poverty rate fell from 12.6% to 12.3%. The bad news is that the number and proportion of Americans who lack health insurance continued to climb, from 44.8m (15.3%) to 47m (15.8%).

Together, these numbers hardly represent the disaster leading Democrats say they do, but neither are they cause for unrestrained glee. Median household income is still below its peak in 1999, and has grown more slowly than income per head, as the rich have gained more than those in the middle. Confusingly, even as median incomes rose, median earnings for full-time workers fell by about 1% between 2005 and 2006. The explanation is that more people are working longer hours.

This lends itself to the sound-bite that Americans are working longer hours for lower wages, but that may be misleading. It is not clear that the same people are being paid less for the hours they work. Rather, it may be that more unskilled people are starting to work full-time instead of part-time or not at all, and therefore bringing down the average, says Gary Burtless of the Brookings Institution, a think-tank. The census data also fail to take account of George Bush’s generous tax cuts, which have boosted take-home pay. On the other hand, they are too old to reflect the fallout from this year’s market turmoil, which could be grave.

The poverty figures are both less accurate and more hopeful. It sounds awful to say that 36.5m Americans are living in poverty. But “poverty” in America, as defined by the Census Bureau, does not mean destitution. A typical poor American lives in a three-bedroom house with a car, air-conditioning and two televisions. His children actually eat more meat than rich kids do. And he receives substantial benefits that the census bizarrely excludes from its calculations.

Read it here: http://economist.com/world/na/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9725549