All Gov – by Noel Brinkerhoff As Americans in the economic middle struggle to keep up, many retailers and other businesses have decided to focus on the demands of the wealthy.
Since the end of the Great Recession, the nation’s top earners have been doing a significant portion of the consumer spending during the weak economic recovery, which is great news for high-end businesses that cater to this class.
But retailers and restaurants that have long catered to the middle class are fading because middle-earners have so little disposal income these days.
The rich (considered the top 5%) don’t have the same problem. They were responsible for nearly 40% of domestic consumption in 2012. Two decades earlier, the rate was only 28% in 1995, according to research performed by economists Steven Fazzari, of Washington University in St. Louis, and Barry Cynamon, a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
They say inflation-adjusted spending by the top 5% has increased 17% since 2009, compared with just 1% among the bottom 95%.
The beneficiaries of increased spending by the wealthy have been luxury gambling properties like the Wynn and the Venetian in Las Vegas, five-star hotels like the Four Seasons and St. Regis, upscale clothing retailer Barneys New York, and others.
Meanwhile, many other companies are floundering, filing for bankruptcy, or closing their doors because they cater to the middle class. These businesses include Olive Garden and Red Lobster restaurants, and retailers Sears, J.C. Penney, and Loehmann’s.
“As a retailer or restaurant chain, if you’re not at the really high level or the low level, that’s a tough place to be,” John G. Maxwell, head of the global retail and consumer practice at PricewaterhouseCoopers, told The New York Times. “You don’t want to be stuck in the middle.”
Fazzari warns that relying too much on the rich to keep the economy going is not a sound long-term strategy.
“It’s going to be hard to maintain strong economic growth with such a large proportion of the population falling behind,” he told theTimes. “We might be able to muddle along—but can we really recover?”
-Noel Brinkerhoff
30 years or more to destroy the middle class. Think about those wonderful families who raised good children and sent them off to college with the hope of landing a good job and enjoying America. Now our leaders have decided that you know we will be a better off country if we just let the parasites feed on these wonderful people. Lets destroy everything they worked hard for. Everything since World War II gone with the so called financial crisis of 2008 or 2009. The psychos had this planned many years ago they just waited for it to actually happen. Now it has.
Interesting statement. Contemptuos souls who profited off peoples sweat, blood and tears. Rothchilds, Windsor, Carnegie, Mellon, Rockefeller, Bush, Cheney, Guliani, Clinton. Nothing but thieves in the night getting away with whatever scheme was hatched to control the flow of goods and services, banks, governments, wars, where those who resisted died. In the 1960’2 US history teachers taught students about political and corporate corruption, about the Carpetbaggers , the Teapot Dome Scandal, etc. It was the Gilded Age. From the time Nixon got into office , by assassination of the Kennedy Brothers, the globalist went to work to silence history, protect corruption, silence whistle blowers. 40 years later we are back in the original days of Standard Oil and John D Rockefeller , always backed secretly by the house of Rothchilds , Windsor Castle and the London Square mile. The destruction of the American Bison in the way of power and money might be compared to the planned destruction of America for wealth and power . These contemporary Carpet Baggers no doubt desired a New Gilded Age for themselves at the expense of the entire planet and its survivability.
correct you are!