Posted on 07/26/2014 9:42:47 AM PDT by quesney
Economic inequality in the United States has been receiving a lot of attention. But it’s not merely an issue of the rich getting richer. The typical American household has been getting poorer, too.
The inflation-adjusted net worth for the typical household was $87,992 in 2003. Ten years later, it was only $56,335, or a 36 percent decline, according to a study financed by the Russell Sage Foundation. Those are the figures for a household at the median point in the wealth distribution — the level at which there are an equal number of households whose worth is higher and lower. But during the same period, the net worth of wealthy households increased substantially.
The Russell Sage study also examined net worth at the 95th percentile. (For households at that level, 94 percent of the population had less wealth and 4 percent had more.) It found that for this well-do-do slice of the population, household net worth increased 14 percent over the same 10 years. Other research, by economists like Edward Wolff at New York University, has shown even greater gains in wealth for the richest 1 percent of households.
For households at the median level of net worth, much of the damage has occurred since the start of the last recession in 2007. Until then, net worth had been rising for the typical household, although at a slower pace than for households in higher wealth brackets. But much of the gain for many typical households came from the rising value of their homes. Exclude that housing wealth and the picture is worse: Median net worth began to decline even earlier.
“The housing bubble basically hid a trend of declining financial wealth at the median that began in 2001,” said Fabian T. Pfeffer, the University of Michigan professor...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
I still notice a whole bunch of new cars being driven everywhere.
The subtle message in the article is class warfare so typical of Leftists.
A 300K house with a 280K mortgage = 20K net worth
50K student loan debt, 30K car note, 10K in bank and 20K house equity is a negative net worth.
They don’t usually have reader comments at all on Saturday afternoons, since no moderators are working and there is no one to review the comments.
This is one of the drawbacks of pre-moderation.
36% less of a more worthless dollar...
bump
My home is water front on Galveston Bay, it is worth maybe 200k, your 300k is BS.
You could just politely disagree.
I don’t want this scourge either.
You obviously don't understand the concept of average. Thus, some will be above $300k and some will be below. Yours happens to be below the average.
You sound bitter because your home is only worth $200k. Don't be jealous of others who do better with their properties.
Opps. Thought this was a different thread where I responded to you. My fault.
Because lots of people don’t own homes, lots have zero or negative equity in their homes and don’t save a dime.
He’s a Socialist (or a variation thereof) so what do you expect? Why does everyone pussyfoot round this issue?
This is data for households — which includes young singles living alone who are scraping by on several part-time jobs and have no real assets, single mothers with children on the dole (likewise on the asset front), each counted as a household, the same as a well-off couple with two children — and is about net worth, not cash-flow, so mortgage balances count against the value of a home, and student loan balances count in the minus column. A newly minted brain surgeon fresh out of surgical residency might be bringing in $300K a year, but still be in the bottom half of the household net worth statistics due to student loan balances and a mortgage.
I thought the debt was $17.5T.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.