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.

    • silence7@slrpnk.netOP
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      2 hours ago

      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.

  • pruwyben@discuss.tchncs.de
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    7 hours ago

    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.

    • grue@lemmy.world
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      3 hours ago

      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.

    • JohnDClay@sh.itjust.works
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      2 hours ago

      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.

  • alykanas@slrpnk.net
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    7 hours ago

    Thank goodness for the rich. I’ve nothing against the poor but they’re such drag on my economy

  • Snot Flickerman
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    11 hours ago

    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.

    • thatKamGuy@sh.itjust.works
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      3 hours ago

      $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.

      • athairmor@lemmy.world
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        1 hour ago

        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.