The wealthiest 10% of Americans own a record 89% of all U.S. stocks

Once you start looking at the numbers behind this, it's almost guaranteed that the real picture will be less outragous and suggest different policy prescriptions than whatever you might think looking at the headline.

Or maybe you already know the details, and already know what we should do. But if so, you got your information from elsewhere, because the article doesn't offer much.

"The problem with America’s semi-rich" https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22673605/upper-middle-class-me...

[1] https://review.chicagobooth.edu/economics/2017/article/never...

It doesn't really make sense to be mad at the 10%, because it will probably include you or others in your family unless you are really stuck.

And there are a lot of people who are stuck. Let's not diminish that. But we will never address that if we are conflating them with young people who just happen to have a low income today but have every reason to see themselves in the middle class.

For reference the top 10% net worth splits at about $1.2M, so both of your points are important.

If you have information to share, I have an open mind. I suspect it will be less outragous than the 10%/89% headline, though.

As noted, even just selling a house in a random state like Wisconsin can easily put you in that bucket.

Top 10% by wealth is a different story harder to attain. It's frustrating that we pay for things with taxes on income and not wealth, because it hits the upper-middle-class harder than it hits the people with all of the equity.

https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/evidence-shows-significant-in...

US is high in social mobility. #27 and improving

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Social_Mobility_Index

> The same holds true for those lower on the income ladder. While just over half of Americans reach the Top 10% at least once in their careers, only 14% stay in it for a decade or more, Hirschl found. (The minimum income threshold for the Top 10% was $141,000.)

https://money.cnn.com/2016/01/07/news/economy/top-1/index.ht...

OK, let's take a look, because the GP was arguing about income mobility across different years of a person's life - intra-generational mobility -- not earnings compared to your parents -- inter-generational mobility. That distinction was the key point made. And the GP is basically correct:

From two studies about intragenerational bottom[1] and top[2] income mobility:

* 53.1 percent will have experienced at least one year within the top 10th percentile

* 36.4 percent will have encountered one year within the top 5th percentile

* 11.1 percent will have experienced one year within the top 1st percentile.

* 70% of Americans spend at least 1 year in the top quintile

* 61% of Americans spend at least 1 year in the bottom quintile.

* 42% of Americans experience at least one year in the bottom decile

Summarizing:

"Taken together, these findings indicate that across the American life course there is a large amount of income volatility. Rather than a rigid class structure, the top and bottom ends of the income distribution are fairly porous. This finding provides an interesting and important caveat to the overall story of rising levels of income inequality across the past 40 years." [2]

Note that a key issue when studying mobility is that you need to do it across a few business cycles. If your study is only during an economic expansion, then it's not going to be meaningful, as life changes tend to clustered around contractions and recoveries, and several such episodes are needed. Thus the studies I selected cover 44 year periods. Some of the studies are for 5-10 year periods, and that's really too small.

---

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/271598246_The_Life_...

[2] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

I'm in my middle 50s. I have friends who have lived below their means all their lives and invested in wisely-- almost all of these people have sizeable savings now.

I also have friends of my age who did not live below means. They spent what they had and invested almost nothing. Predictably, they have nothing to show.

The system works. It's been foretold in investing books for decades.

Today, we have resources like Bogleheads, Mr. Money Mustache, Dave Ramsey, etc. they all preach the same message, and the message is overwhelmingly truthful.

Accumulating wealth is relatively certain, if you follow the process. There will be rare exceptions, but that's true of most everything.

how many of them get to the top 20%, how many more get to the top 30%? in other words, there's no need to be the best basketball player to succeed in life.

> but considering that our current wealth inequality is worst than 1774 France, then I believe it's a fairly accurate picture being painted.

wealth inequality is a meaningless measure, as J. K. Rowling increased it the moment she published her first book, and made it even larger with subsequent releases. If you look at the statistics of it, it might look as if she took advantage of her readers by making them financially poorer by the cost of books they bought. Obviously, the stats have no concern of non-monetary value exchanged here, and proclaim wealth inequality instead.

"Rather than using the more traditional metric of income, this study uses educational attainment as the basis for defining upward mobility."

The Atlantic article seems like more of the same: comparing brackets and ignoring mobility.

But not controlling for age is still a major omission. A lot of middle class people are in the top 10% as they near retirement because they've been saving throughout their life. How many? The article doesn't say.

The 90%ile is $129,000/yr individual income.

https://dqydj.com/income-percentile-calculator/

Kind of an important caveat, no? It’s the entire principle behind having a democracy.

If they're doing a bad job, the recourse (at least in theory) is to elect better leaders. What recourse do we have when the rich abuse their power?

https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/040315/what-can-sha...

Well, most decisions are outsourced to the board members, who's membership is the main thing shareholders vote on.

Mandatory reporting kicks in at 5 percent ownership. At 10 percent, the SEC considers you an insider[1]. Before that, I doubt board members even know you exist unless you talk to them first (and they aren't taking your calls or mine).

[1]: https://www.sec.gov/smallbusiness/goingpublic/officersanddir...

I'd say you're half right, here. The Fed prints money spends $80 billion a month on treasuries and $40 billion a month on mortgage backed securities, so if you're a government contractor or you have a lot of real estate assets, you're effectively robbing everyone else's savings and devaluing their wages.

The idea that inflation is killing us is simply not true.

I'd much rather the economy be controlled by the top 10% of a productive society than by the 1% of a bureaucratic structure.

This is one of my favorite Kai Ryssdal-isms.

While this is true, it's not true to a lot of people: politicians and us regular-folk alike often equate the stock market's performance to the state of the economy (hence why this is a saying at all).

I like to think of the stock market as an insight into wealth-transfer (from the poor to the rich, obviously... it doesn't flow any other way in the US at this point). When stocks do really well, especially those of service/retail companies, the already-rich are getting richer, generally at the expense of the rest of us.

[1] http://www.pensionrights.org/publications/statistic/how-many...

I mean sure, democracy isn't optimal for selecting the best people, but do you think those 10% that do own most of that stock were selected by their skills and abilities?

Alternative take: everyone already does have a say in what happens, as they participate. Nobody gets to dictate their own terms, though, but neither does anyone in politics.

The primary objective of the US government for its people should be to provide everyone with the same basic opportunities. What they do with those opportunities is up to them, like it is in any other country which already does these things.

Access to education and universal healthcare + a livable minimum wage at the very least.

Once your children are fed, happy and healthy and you don't have to work 2 jobs to make ends meet, you have more time to spend with your kids and provide them with an upbringing which will allow them to have a fair chance at becoming one of the people who make those decisions.

There's obviously a major influence on US democracy coming from the decision makers of the "economy".

So the question is, which is more important, and to whom? The majority doesn't have much of a say in the economy unless they band together, which is nearly impossible in a diverse and (intentionally) divided US.

A flawed democracy also means that the kind of drastic change that's needed to correct this imbalance can't happen.

The Walton heirs have over $200 billion. I guess Alice Walton ($60 billion), who killed someone with her car in 1989, nine years before being charged with DWI for driving her car into a gas meter is one of those epitomes of meritocracy. Or the Koch heirs, the Mars heirs and so on and so forth. The economy is designed for the benefit of the heirs of the St. Grottlesex set, of this meritocracy you speak of.

However, in 1825 Jefferson noted that, much like today, the country was becoming increasingly controlled by what he termed 'monied in corporations' and therefore seemed to be eroding the achievements of the revolution:

[T]his opens with a vast accession of strength from their younger recruits, who having nothing in them of the feelings or principles of ’76 now look to a single and splendid government of an Aristocracy, founded on banking institutions and monied in corporations under the guise and cloak of their favored branches of manufactures commerce and navigation, riding and ruling over the plundered ploughman and beggared yeomanry. this will be to them a next best blessing to the Monarchy of their first aim, and perhaps the surest stepping stone to it.

https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/98-01-02-5...

We won't know for at least another five years at a minimum.

Because the majority (50%) of the money spent by the US Federal government is mainly from federal income tax.

https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/what-are-sourc...

Here's a page which talks about the effective tax rates of, as far as I can tell, all taxes people in the USA pay:

https://itep.org/who-pays-taxes-in-america-in-2020/

This is far more useful for the discussion about how we pay for common goods than "61% of Americans pay no federal income taxes".

(Never heard of ITEP before this, but they claim to be non-partisan, FWIW.)

Of course, in addition to the lying by omission, the true irony here is that the "lack" of "federal" taxes paid by the masses is more so a symptom of a deeply inequitable economic system than the counterbalancing endorsement of the status quo the OP likely envisions it to be.

How about turn your question around and ask why the top CEOs (especially in tech) pay $0 federal income taxes claim they did pay taxes when they are referencing having paid sales tax, as if not paying sales tax is even a real issue, is in good faith.

It's like responding to "Joe didn't pay for his main course at the restaurant" with "yeah but he paid for some of the appetizers."

It turns out that only about 20% of taxpayers send more money to the government than they receive in aggregate across all forms of taxation and transfers. Another 20% of taxpayers roughly pay their own way, providing about as much tax revenue as they receive in transfers. 60% of taxpayers receive more in transfer payments and other distributions than they pay in taxes (not that surprising with things like Social Security).

tl;dr: across all Federal taxes and transfer payments taken as net, 20% of taxpayers are paying taxes that are transferred to 60% of taxpayers.

Individual States have diverse taxation structures, so the net taxpayer statistics likely vary widely.

Nobody on earth would ever read "not paying federal taxes" as meaning also not paying social security, medicare, sales or property taxes.

Do you have a source for either of these claims? I can’t seem to find a clear one, especially for the latter claim.

[1] https://www.equilar.com/reports/83-equilar-associated-press-...

It means their income is very low: OP is just pointing out how US society is very very polarized between a small group rich owners (10% that own almost all the stocks) and and a big group of poor people (60% of the population).

Then, of course, there's unearned income -- very much so related to the topic of "stock ownership" that started this thread -- which, by definition, is acquired not through any meaningful contribution of labor to the "economy", but instead as a reward for the incidental private claim to profits our economic system happens to allow to people.

Why do you think that if they receive 47.7%, they should pay 90% of the taxes?

That would be true if it were a credit, but it is a deduction.

Based on the headline, I would have assumed that 57% of people had enough deductions/low enough income to be below the bottom income tax bracket. Which is correct, based on what you said.

So its very easy to use this to your advantage and appeal to emotion, when convenient, or pass tougher tax laws that never affect you, which is even more convenient.

I have no experience of third world countries, but if I am destined to be poor, I would rather live in ex-soviet block countries like Czech Republic. They gave half-decent public services, healthcare, etc.

Whether people get replaced by AI/ML/Algos for middle-management decision-making, or they get replaced by kiosks and hamburger assembly devices at a fast food hut, there will be the owners of the means of production, and there will be the newly unemployed workers.

The fear expressed by the OP (and me) is over the long run, how will we keep the owners of all that capital and production from wringing out the lower 90% to the point where "snow crash" reads like a documentary?

I've heard of them, but thought they vanished when the boomers left the workforce.

Such a joke. I remember when an ING money market was paying like some crazy 4 or 5% in the late 90's.

But it takes a bit more effort to combine this number with what the article offers into a coherent point.

If the top 10% has a lot of older workers-and-savers in it, then it's not very outragous.

Your numbers don't answer that very clearly. Are those people who have worked for 40 years? Does it include spouses who may have worked for less time? And how does the median (50th percentile) translate into the 10th percentile, and what's the wealth cutoff for the 10th percentile?

I live in a poor neighborhood in a reasonably large city.

I shop locally (even avoiding the more affluent neighborhoods), exclusively if possible, as a matter of voting with my wallet because the businesses in my neighborhood employ mostly local folks.

At large scale, yeah, you're right. But for a small local business, one or two extra regular customers can be a bigger difference (drop in a bucket vs drop in the ocean). Even something like shopping at a local big-box supports the local proletariat more than shopping at Amazon, where the proletariat isn't guaranteed to be local at all (and to be clear: it's more about supporting the proletariat than the capitalists).

You can be part of the wealthiest 10% while having no income at all (not forever, but...)

Perhaps in a disinflationary environment more poor people would save money and there would be more upward mobility. Of course, rich people would use hedges to make more money rather than just hedge against inflation, so that investment wouldn't go away. People that hoard currency lose out in all but a deflationary environment.

Either way the idea that a class of people who take their dollars and put them in deflationary or disinflationary hedge investments lose while a class who keep cash in their mattress (if they're lucky enough to have savings after prices rise) win in an inflationary environment is missing a lot of economic behavior and dynamic and IMO is oversimplified and wrong.

If anybody finds a reliable recent source for this wealth data, please share. I'm not seeing anything particularly trustworthy with a quick search.

however, to answer your question, i would guess the majority of US based HN readers are in that 100k+ bracket. the audience here skews very high income i would guess.