The Rich Have Stopped Spending And That’s Tanked The Economy. Though I think NPR’s talk of the economy being “tanked” is somewhat myopic. Or maybe it’s just expressing a hope. But the research does suggest that — unlike Obama’s financial crisis bailouts — the benefits of this stimulus have gone to working people:
Researchers based at Harvard have been tracking spending patterns using credit card data. They found that people at the bottom of the income ladder are now spending nearly as much as they did before the coronavirus pandemic.
“When the stimulus checks went out, you see that spending by lower-income households went up a lot,” said Nathan Hendren, a Harvard economist and co-founder of the Opportunity Insights research team.
However, the wealthy are not matching them. “For higher-income individuals, that spending is still way far off from where it was prior to COVID and it has not recovered as much,” Hendren said.
The tourist attractions around here are doing quite well, and I suspect that’s because they’re patronized by working class people who drive to their vacations, and to whom $600 a week on top of unemployment is real money. I hear Palm Beach isn’t so crowded, and the stores on Worth Street are closed.
h/t Glenn Reynolds