Wealthiest 10% of Americans make up 50% of purchases and consumer spendings | Hacker News Reader

Wealthiest 10% of Americans make up 50% of purchases and consumer spendings

morningbrew.com

One thing to keep in mind is this is also the expected trend of an aging population. Retirement is a relatively new concept in human history, and the peak of our retirees as a percentage of our population is happening right now.

Retirees now make up 27% of our population. By nature they report very low incomes and also very low spending. They also happen to be sitting on large amounts of wealth. Which is why you get some paradoxical results when trying to analyze the health of our economy - your age is an even stronger predictor of how you feel about the economy than your income!

The retiree boom does not cause inequality - but it exacerbates it. It emphasizes the glut of money on the market and inflated asset prices. And especially things like healthcare and housing costs.

Ironically, the one thing that would save us would be increasing the share of working age families through immigration.

A figure floated around a decade or two ago: 75% of wealth was in the hands of the age 55+ crowd. That makes sense for the reasons you mentioned.

It all changes hands within a few decades though. Nobody lives forever.

> It all changes hands within a few decades though. Nobody lives forever.

Unfortunately they’re trying.

Wouldn't it be cool if a .org could be established and funded by older wealthier folks that directly provides mortgages to the young, without the greedy bankers involved? Sometimes when I was earning free crypto on coinbase in exchange for learning about new coin offerings, I sensed the foundations for new, very low cost, "zero trust" systems for finance that would not involve the current high-profit monopolist bankster systems. Maybe it's just a question of when. What reason is there for a gap of 3% or more between a certificate of deposit, and what is charged in interest to a new home buyer? It's a staggering difference, hidden in plain sight, that keeps the young in debt to the mortgage banking induustry.

Ominous economic indicator demonstrating the concentration of economic power and spending in a small group, highlighting increased inequality and social instability.

Ignoring the pandemic, the percentage has been north of 45% since 2014 or so, according to Moody's: https://archive.is/AW6rW

I always see this for the US. Does anyone have data for other countries?

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