Paul Overberg and John McCormick:

Amer­i­cans as a whole have ex­pe­ri­enced two years in a row of flat or de­clin­ing house­hold in­come, new gov­ern­ment data showed Tues­day, re­flect­ing the pan­dem­ic’s lin­ger­ing eco­nomic pain as in­fla­tion is also tak­ing the largest bite out of pock­et­books in four decades.

The lack of any real growth for 2021 fol­lows a de­crease in in­comes recorded in 2020, the first year of the pan­demic. To­tals in 2020 and 2021 were boosted by sig­nif­i­cant gov­ern­ment spend­ing in re­sponse to the pan­demic that helped re­duce poverty.