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.
In many areas of the US, this just means both parents work and have solidly middle-class (but by no means extravagant) incomes. My wife and I both work and we can cover the mortgage, all the expenses related to our kid, home ownership expenses, modest savings, etc. We are certainly not buying luxury cars or Gucci bags. Our big spends involve housing, healthcare costs, food costs.
I’m not sure who these people are who are affording discretionary purchases of hobby related stuff and luxury goods. That’s probably more like the 1-2%. Either that or people are amassing debt so they can look the part and “keep up with the Joneses”.
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.
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: $632kNote 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.
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.
Households earning at least six figures a year are expected to make up the largest share of holiday travelers this season — 45%, up from 38% in 2023, according to a recent survey by the consulting firm Deloitte. And they’re on track to make up a majority of paid lodging customers, expanding their ranks as hotel guests from 43% last season to 52% now.
“Travelers are looking to invest in upgrades and experiences that will make the holiday memorable,” said Kate Ferrara, vice chair for U.S. transportation, hospitality and services at Deloitte.
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.
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.
That’s only because no one else has spare money to spend.
It doesn’t depend on them they’re just THE ONLY ONES WITH FUCKING MONEY. Title almost makes it seem like they’re cucking for rich people. Yeah no shit they’re the main consumers they’re the only ones who can afford to.
That’s because they’ve seized all the money.
More significantly, a tiny chunk of them have seized the bulk of the money and other assets. The 90th percentile worker sees the insecurity that they’ll experience with a job loss. Somebody in the top 0.1% is likely a rentier who can live off the rest of us and not care.
Fuck rich people, and fuck you if you like them. I hate rich people so much.
See my other post in here for some context. Someone earning $250,000 a year is probably still working for that income. They’re rich, sure, but they aren’t the problem nor are they your enemy. WSJ publishes stuff like this to keep the working class infighting, like crabs trying to climb out of a bucket.
Someone that makes 250k a year is not rich.
Depends on how you define rich, I suppose. The reason I used that number is that’s what the article is defining as the top 10%.
The highest earning 10% also have about 67% of the wealth, so they are actually underperforming compared to the rest of the population. It’s just that they have all the money.
they are actually underperforming compared to the rest of the population
They always do, which is a big part of why the “FairTax[sic]” is such a scam.
And by “always,” I mean literally without exception, because the difference between the working class and owner class is defined by it.
Thanks for the number, do you have a link where you got it from? I suspected something like this might be the case, but I couldn’t find a source easily online.
Here: https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distribute/table/
I switched the table to Shares (%) and added up the latest values of the first 3 columns.
They’re literally trying to build an economy that starves regular people out of it. They don’t care anymore, they want it all.
A whole ass country full of fucking Veruca Salts.
Well, there’s 2 Verucas running the white House right now. I’m sure they care about fixing this issue.
What an insidious way to frame poverty and wealth disparity.
I cannot remember a time a headline filled me with such hatred and anger toward a person.
I hope Ms. Ensign gets exactly what she deserves.
Her WSJ biography REEKS of boot licking and discredited economic theory:
Regular people hoping to become millionaires and billionaires
Ah yes the temporarily embarrased millionaires.
It’s fitting imo, because they’ve stolen the wealth and think that Luigi’s case is just a freak accident rather than the upcoming Bell Riots.
On a side note, I always figured the Bell Riots that were supposed to be back in September of our timeline were just a hair delayed and slightly miscalculated.
Maybe records became fuzzy due to the whole WWIII issue.
Good call
Maybe if you didn’t fucking rob the other 90%, the numbers would be different.
Exactly. They seem to be concluding that only the wealthy can bear the burden of spending money for the rest of us?
$250K isn’t that outrageous of a household income (or at least it shouldn’t be); literally two good white collar jobs would reach that point in the coastal cities.
The bigger thing at issue is to not frame it as 90% vs 10%, it’s literally 99% vs 1% — if not 99.9% vs. 0.1% if we are really talking about the ‘disconnected from reality wealthy’.
That’s the line that the wealthiest amongst us are trying to draw, in order to build class disunity. A white-collar household pulling in $250K has a lot more in common with a blue-collar household pulling in $65K, than they do the oligarchy above them.
Yeah, $250k in an average to high cost of living area is middle class comfortable. Not rich.
Calling that income rich is a tactic to get the middle class to identify with the billionaires and support regressive policies.
As someone who has lived both experiences, you are absolutely correct.
Thank goodness for the rich. I’ve nothing against the poor but they’re such drag on my economy
BECAUSE! They.Stole.all.the.MONEY!
Wow, an actually important economic statistic, here on Lemmy? 👏
