The Rich Get Richer, Part N

The Times reports that businessmen are talking like left-wing academics these days, retooling their strategies around selling to the rich because the middle class has no money to spend:

In response to the upward shift in spending, PricewaterhouseCoopers clients like big stores and restaurants are chasing richer customers with a wider offering of high-end goods and services, or focusing on rock-bottom prices to attract the expanding ranks of penny-pinching consumers. “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,” Mr. Maxwell said. “You don’t want to be stuck in the middle.”

Since the crash, things have only gotten worse:

The current recovery has been driven almost entirely by the upper crust, according to Mr. Fazzari and Mr. Cynamon. Since 2009, the year the recession ended, inflation-adjusted spending by this top echelon has risen 17 percent, compared with just 1 percent among the bottom 95 percent.

The chart at the top of the post shows the percentage of overall consumer spending by the top 5 percent of earners; they now account for 38% of all consumer spending in America. And this does not bode well for the economic future:

While spending among the most affluent consumers has managed to propel the economy forward, the sharpening divide is worrying, Mr. Fazzari said. “It’s going to be hard to maintain strong economic growth with such a large proportion of the population falling behind,” he said. “We might be able to muddle along — but can we really recover?”

Meanwhile, one of our two political parties is still focused on creating more of this same kind of “growth” by cutting taxes on the rich and cutting spending on everyone else.