The 9.9 Percent is the New American Aristocracy (2018)

It is hard to see this trend reversing any time soon.

Good paying “blue collar” jobs are hard to come by in the US. And even those lucky to find a good job in a trade would need to have the financial literacy to accumulate wealth.

Your average citizen of the United States doesn’t understand how graduated taxes work let alone how their 401K works. I don’t think this is a class issue either, because I have heard some fairly wealthy people complain that their raise at work was going to put them in a higher tax bracket so they were going to make less money than before their raise. It is just the wealthy can pay someone to do their taxes and invest their money. And they make enough that the fees are marginal.

Accumulating wealth is teachable, but if you have come from a family that has nothing it is likely your family has no idea how it is done and you are left to navigate it on your own.

My first question on figure 1: Where’s the backdrop of total wealth against the shift?

Fortunately, the ‘past’ link sorted this out for me.

Secondarily, how do we know who’s giving up the growth? It’s not necessarily constant nor earmarked for each (arbitrary) group.

> from anbende on May 28, 2018:

> I did a little research and math. The top 1% holds 40% of US wealth. The top 10% holds 77%. That’s 37% to “the 9%”. I would hypothesize that even within this 9% we’d find the wealth concentrated at the top in the “2nd 1%”, i.e., the top 2% likely make the middle class look mostly irrelevant.