The top 10% of earners—households making about $250,000 a year or more—are splurging on everything from vacations to designer handbags, buoyed by big gains in stocks, real estate and other assets.
Those consumers now account for 49.7% of all spending, a record in data going back to 1989, according to an analysis by Moody’s Analytics. Three decades ago, they accounted for about 36%.
The top-level post uses a gift link. When it runs out, there is an archived copy of the article.
A friendly reminder that articles like this serve to create infighting among the worker class.
Someone earning $250,000 is definitely rich, but they’re nowhere even close to the level of rich that makes wealth distribution problematic. And they’re probably working for that income.
Check out Wealth Shown to Scale (Archive link here because apparently the page is down).
Everyone who isn’t a billionaire ought to be on the same side: against billionaires. But the WSJ publishes stuff like this to make you direct your ire at doctors and lawyers instead of at the people leeching from society.
They also intentionally frame a really bad thing as a “good” thing. The situation here is not that the “rich” run the economy - it’s that everyone else is being priced out of the economy by wage stagnation and rising costs of living.
The alternate headline here is “wealth inequality surges, 90% of Americans now account for only 50% of consumer spending”
Or
“1 in 10 Americans spending as much as the other 9 combined, while 3 of them live paycheck to paycheck”
People earning 6 digits a year are still one bad accident or diagnosis away from losing their jobs and living in poverty. They’re not the root problem or the solution to the economy, and this article is trying to paint them as both.
Instead we need to acknowledge that the people “earning” 8-10 digits per year are extracting and hoarding that money away from the 90% of Americans who would otherwise be spending it in ways that would actually improve the economy.
People making 250k are largely on the side of the billionaires. They are reliable votes for the interests of the rich.
Because they are falling for the same propaganda, but on the other side of the coin. Don’t waste your time vilifying them for falling for the same line we all do. It serves no purpose except to make you angry.
Having earned that for several years (though not any longer), in the SF bay area where I lived, that was the lower end of the upper middle class. I’ve since retired, and have subsequently taken on a post-retirement job in public service, so my earnings aren’t that high any more.
I’d categorize lipo specialists, many cosmetic surgeons and most non-criminal lawyers among the leeches, though your point holds. I’d add that there’s a distinction between those doing real jobs and those pursuing the discretionary spending of the very rich. Sorry, yachtmakers, private-jet leasers, coke dealers and high-end escort agencies, you’ll have to learn to do something else.
To expand further on what you’re saying, the problem with the linked article’s mathematical/statistical analysis is that it uses a slightly more sophisticated version of misleadingly using “average”/mean in a context where median would be more appropriate.
Specifically, they talk about the spending of the top 10% in the aggregate, and point to the threshold of when a household tips into that top decile. Well, that aggregated number is itself heavily skewed towards the higher end of that spectrum, where the people in the 99th percentile are contributing a lot more weight than those in the 90th.
Here are the cutoffs for income thresholds to hit each percentile at or above 90:
90: $235k
91: $246k
92: $260k
93: $275k
94: $295k
95: $316k
96: $348k
97: $391k
98: $461k
99: $632k
Note that this doesn’t even get into the 0.5% or 0.1%, which skew things even further. Even without that level of granularity, you can see that the median in this group is about $305k while the mean is closer to $350k.
When you include the billionaires, the difference skews even further.
That’s the math error at the center of this thesis. The facts reported might be true, but in a way that groups things together misleadingly.
yup. I will admit though that as you get higher a larger percentage of folks think they are rich and support the wrong side. Had so many docotors complain about taxes and talk conservative politics wise and im like dudes you are just over the top tax bracket. the problem is there should be more brackets that go higher not that the top should be decreased. Heck your bracket can’t be decreased till its not the top one.
Yep. They’re getting the same propaganda and falling for it too. The entire idea of the “middle class” is to get workers with something to think workers with nothing are the enemy, and get them to ignore the leeches with nearly everything.
still amazes me that the brackets end in the low six figure territory when we have billionaires. I remember a supposed quote from the head of the irs back in ww2 times about how his job was to figure out elvises taxes. Like because he was the highest paid guy. Man to have rich folks proud to pay taxes as a patriotic duty. Those were the days.
Reminded me of this doublespeak class warfare article from November: Rich people are dominating holiday travel - Most hotel guests this season will be people making six-figure incomes, analysts say.
This was an example of pure psychological warfare to get people to spend more money at hotels. “Well, those ‘rich’ $100k earners are upgrading their stay, I will to!”
Corpo “news” is such shit.