New data from the Census Bureau shows that about two in five Americans are still struggling to get by even after the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Daily Mail reported.
According to the bureau's latest household survey, 38.5% of adults (more than 89 million people) said they experienced difficulty paying bills between April 26 and May 8, up from 34.4% from last year.
Even the 2022 number of budget crunches was up from 26.7% in 2021, meaning that there has been an approximately 50% increase in the last three years, despite other economic indicators that would suggest recovery.
In addition, more than half of U.S. states are currently above 40%, with results varying wildly depending on geography. States with low average salaries, like Mississippi and Louisiana, faced some of the worst budget problems.
Other states that had the worst rates of financial livability, including Texas, Georgia, and Alabama, also had disproportionately high budget issues.
Meanwhile, over 25 million households say they used credit cards or took a loan out before their next paycheck. That's up from 22.4 million from 2022 and the highest number recorded since the survey's creation.
"The Household Pulse Survey is a 20-minute online survey studying how the coronavirus pandemic and other emergent issues are impacting households across the country from a social and economic perspective," the bureau wrote.
Questions were related to core demographic household characteristics like child care arrangements and cost, employment, food sufficiency, spending habits, and inflation concerns.
The results came despite the Federal Reserve's hiking of interest rates to combat inflation since the pandemic ended, with central bankers recently indicating that rates could continue to rise.
From tighter bank credit to potentially weaker household cash balances, "you could tell yourself a story where inflation comes down relatively quickly ... with only a modest economic slowdown," Thomas I. Barkin, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, told Reuters.
But Barkin added: "I'm not yet convinced ... [and] I do wonder whether we're not going to need more impact on demand to bring inflation down to where we need to go."
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