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Comment by gowld | Hacker News Reader

> My theory is that we are simply too wealthy.

Maybe 0.1% to 1% of us are, but the rest of us aren't.

Nah. The top 10 percent of US households make $190,000 per year. That is simply a lot more money than a household strictly needs. At that point, your Roth IRA is maxed out, you own a home, and you still have thousands every single paycheck to play with.

Funny money.

This tracks with a report[1] that nearly half of consumer spending now comes from the top 10%.

[1]: https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-dow-sp50...

Wealth inequality is intensely fractal, at every level it is enormous: someone at the 90th %ile household (there are 15 million of these), making 178k (1), can mostly imagine what someone at the 97th %ile, making 350k, would live like (there are 4.6 million of these), but someone at the 99th %, making 663k would be harder to imagine, and someone at the 99.9th %ile, making 3.2 million a year is basically impossible, and the 1500 taxpaying units at the 99.99th %ile, making 85 million a year is simply out of the frame of reality.

1: All stats are 2022 tax year, and are AGI per tax return, so excluding things like 401(k), based on https://www.irs.gov/statistics/soi-tax-stats-individual-stat... and defining household as "taxpaying unit"- e.g. married filing separately would count as two, at two separate levels of income

I think it's more insidious than the top 1%, what % of americans buy some frivolous overpriced coffee or cookie regularly? viral beverages like prime? the absurdity of ordering mcdonalds via uber eats?

income inequality is wild right now, but even lower classes are participating in some absurd sort of money grabs regularly...

the top of the market, these billion dollar companies that have perfected this sort of private equity capitalism have optimized every day luxury that can bleed anyone dry... not just the rich... wework or wish go down the tubes and it's on to the next one, founders rocket off and some unlucky investors are stuck holding the bag

every category of daily life now has some optimized extraction mechanism

Wealth inequality; too much of the wealth that exists is concentrated where it is worth the least.

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