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.
Maybe if you didn’t fucking rob the other 90%, the numbers would be different.
$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.