sealybobo The point is saving and investing is within the grasp of most people. I started saving money when I was 12 delivering papers and shoveling driveways.
Is it?
Asset income per capita has nearly doubled since 1990 for the top 10 percent of counties (1.7 times higher), while it has hardly changed for the bottom 90 percent.
Not to bring up race, but check this out
Highlighting the racial wealth gap, the residents of Cleveland’s least diverse neighborhood earned a total of $262 million in dividends in the 2018 tax year, or $15,800 per a person, compared to a total of $27,000 that went to residents of its most diverse neighborhood, or around a dollar per a person.
Asset ownership gives individuals and families a seat at the table in our economic system beyond the wages they earn from their employer. Household financial stability—the freedom to not have to live paycheck to paycheck—is thus a cornerstone of inclusive prosperity. Yet only a minority of Americans own any assets beyond the main three: their homes, cars, and retirement accounts.
Asset poverty, defined as insufficient net worth to cover three months of living expenses absent any labor income, is much more pervasive in the United States than income poverty, with an estimated 77 percent of low- to moderate-income American households defined as asset poor.1
Non-labor income has increased from 23 percent of personal income in 1969 to 37 percent in 2019. In 2019, earnings represented 63 percent of income, compared to 17 percent for transfers and 20 percent for income from assets. This 50-year trend is in large part driven by increased income from assets for the wealthy and increased government transfers to the poor. One of the biggest differences between the period of economic growth in the 1990s versus the 2010s is that earnings saw more robust growth than asset income in the 1990s, whereas the reverse was true for most of the 2010s. From 2010 to 2019, assets grew by 73 percent, while earnings grew by just 45 percent.
Almost two-thirds of counties had asset income per capita below the average of all U.S. counties in 2019, compared to around half in 1969. In other words, the median American county has fallen behind the county average over time as more asset income concentrates in fewer places. The gap between the county with the lowest and highest asset income per capita doubled from 1969 to 1990 and then increased by a factor of six from 1990 to 2019.
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