When I check out at Safeway, I notice about 1/3 of the time the person in front of me pays with a 'card' for food items, then pays cash for the candy and booze. I assume they are on some kind of welfare program or 'food assistance.' Also, the rich have capital that create jobs....that's what retained capital is used for. And, "nobody ever got a job from someone who is poor."
But, I asked Perplexity AI to chime in on the article too:
"The article’s core claim is overstated: inequality is real, but the jump from “the rich spend more” to “the bottom 60% barely matter” is not supported by the best available data. The biggest fallacy is a **false inference** from concentration to irrelevance.[1][2][3]
## Main fallacies
- **False dilemma / false binary.** The piece implies either the wealthy drive the economy or ordinary workers do; in reality, both groups matter, because mass household spending still makes up a large share of consumption and demand. The Minneapolis Fed notes the “K-shaped” story is more complicated than headlines suggest, and BLS spending data still show broad-based household consumption, not economic disappearance by the bottom 60%.[2][1]
- **Equivocation on “the economy.”** It quietly shifts between consumer spending, GDP, retail sales, and asset markets as though they were the same thing. That lets it smuggle in a story about luxury and AI spending while pretending it proves a claim about the whole economy.[3][1]
- **Overreliance on one shaky metric.** The “top 10% account for roughly half of consumer spending” line comes from a private estimate that the Minneapolis Fed explicitly says is not a direct measure of household consumption expenditures and is criticized for building spending from savings and wealth data.[1]
- **Cherry-picking / selective emphasis.** The article highlights high-end consumption and weak spot examples like debt and housing stress, but ignores counterevidence such as official survey data showing the bottom half still accounts for a substantial share of spending, and that spending growth patterns have not been consistently “K-shaped.”[2][3][1]
- **Causal oversimplification.** It suggests inequality automatically means ordinary workers no longer “matter” to markets. That is a leap: firms still depend on broad consumer demand for housing, food, transport, health care, and services, and even the Fed’s review says the data do not support a simple K-shaped conclusion.[1][2]
## What the data actually say
The Federal Reserve’s Minneapolis review says the most dramatic “top 10% spends almost half” claim comes from Moody’s-style estimates, but that other data sources show a much more modest pattern. The BLS Consumer Expenditure Survey reports average annual household spending of $78,535 in 2024 and remains the standard survey source for household expenditures, while the Fed review says the CE and related BEA-BLS distributional data do not show a clear post-pandemic K-shaped consumption story.[3][2][1]
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So there. UW-ing would like a further explanation from the appraiser. : )
