That's just a little bit of redistribution from the top 1% to the top 10%, at best. Tech startups and their new fancy apps aren't putting food on the table or paying the health care bill for the bottom 90%.
Savings rate goes up with income. On a percentage basis, the 10% are going to be spending more money at restaurants, shops, etc. This is, arguably, preferable to the 1% investing it in the stock market.
Arguably is the right word.
The global economy is a closed system, so money put anywhere makes its way elsewhere. Spending money in restaurants and shops is most easily visible, but not necessarily any better than other investment.
Even in your example, the 1% putting money in the stock market provides capital for companies as well as income for banks and brokers and finance folk of all sorts (which can then be spent in restaurants and shops). Sure, lower income people have a higher propensity to spend a marginal dollar (because they have to), but that isn't necessarily "better".
* my broker/bank takes some. If my broker is a public company, some of the money goes to pay operational expenses, and some of the money goes to their shareholders as dividends.
* the stocks I bought go up slightly. They get cheaper capital, and their owners get an unrealized gain.
Schematically, we can assume all bank employees put all their money into the stock market. So the end result is that the benefits accrue to shareholders of public companies, regardless of which stock you buy.
But if money never exits the financial system to go back into the real economy, none of this matters. If a large chunk of the public stock market is held by buy-and-hold investors who just never liquidate their investments nor pay tax, this money will never come to benefit ordinary folks.
Some of it will, by way of pension funds and whatnot. But it's worse than spending it on normal consumption, as I see it.
Our taxes went up under Trump. Healthcare got worse under Obama.
The billionaire class uses the 90 percent to win elections. They have stopped pandering to us.
Both candidates felt they deserved votes and deserved to win (Donald Trump no less a narcissist or elitist than Hillary Clinton) and both worked to earn their votes.
However, Donald Trump was willing to make promises to working class people he had no capacity or desire to deliver on, and Hillary Clinton more or less ignored them in favor of pandering to the upper middle class and the left. Neither candidates' strategy says anything about their relative honesty or integrity, one just happened to work better than the other.
In a different universe with slightly different conditions, Clinton might easily have won. Remember, she did literally "earn" more votes than Trump (not that it matters as far as the system is concerned.)
But yes, we get it... "Trump good, Clinton bad." Zing.
http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/assets/documents/mobi... http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/assets/documents/move...
The entire point of "economic mobility" is as a measure of the extent to which that statement is not true.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socioeconomic_mobility_in_the_... (cites several survey papers and 1 or 2 originals)
From a 2015 stanford report (https://web.stanford.edu/~pmitnik/EconomicMobilityintheUnite...):
"Approximately half of parental income advantages are passed on to children. The IGE, when averaged across all levels of parental income, is estimated at 0.52 for men and 0.47 for women. These estimates are at the high end of previous estimates and imply that the United States is very immobile."
Lots more where that came from.
This isn't class warfare. It's a statement of fact that in the USA you are likely to remain in the income bracket you were born into. What do to about that is where "class warfare" begins, if you insist on using that term.