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.
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.