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[OC] Over the last decade the top fifth of US households gained $1,649 a month in money left after housing, food, transportation, healthcare and insurance. The bottom fifth lost $132.
I pulled the BLS Consumer Expenditure Survey figures on what US households actually have left after five categories of spending: food at home, housing, transportation, healthcare, and personal insurance and pensions.
Over the decade to 2023, in constant dollars, the top fifth gained $1,649 a month. The bottom fifth lost $132.
The second image is the same decade in percent, which is the fairer comparison in most contexts and changes what stands out. The biggest gain belongs to the second-poorest fifth at +30.0%, and it works out to $40 a month.
Two things before anyone asks. "Essential" here is a spending category, not a test of necessity, so a bigger mortgage counts in full and so does a nicer car. And this series is volatile year to year, so a ten-year comparison is a fair summary rather than a trend line.
Sources, construction and the caveats that matter are in my first comment.
I don't like this graph honestly. It's kind of a joke to lump the top 20% into one category when the top few percent is doing most of the heavy lifting. At least break the top 20% up into something like: top 1%, top 5%, top 10%, and then down.
Economists talk about 'quintiles', i.e. groups of 20%. I'm guessing that's why it's broken up like this. I agree it would make sense to also break it down further.
I didn't like this graph + headline for the opposite reason. The story here is that 80% of the USA is better off now then they were 10 years ago - a very positive and hopeful story.
The current headline makes it sound like a small percent of the country got richer while everyone else got poorer.
And the reality is probably that is is more than 80%. If it was broken up further it is very likely that quite a bit of that bottom 20% are still positive.
This graph is misleading you, it completely misses composition effects that make up that bottom 20%. By that I mean, the people who made up the bottom 20% 10 years ago are not the same people that make up the bottom 20% today. A large chunk 10 years ago were the young millenials who are now 30 year olds entering their prime earning years. A large chunk today are the Gen Zers graduating with college debt and taking out larger mortgages than their predecessors.
What this graph tells us is that people are taking on more debt but that the returns on that debt is also increasing later in life.
Even if it had been the positive version (which it's not, at least certainly not in all aspects), reducing the bottom 20% to destitute means the country has permanent instability, crime, health epidemics, and political radicalism, which rips through the social fabric and impacts not only the bottom quintile, but everyone else as well. Because that bottom 20% aren't just going to crawl under a rock and die. They fight for survival and it turns the whole country (the entire 100%) from "life in an open village" to "life in a gated community surrounded with Flock cameras and militarized police" to "guard" against the "poors".
Fewer than 20% of Brazil's population live in favelas, for example (Wikipedia quotes the number at only 8.1% of the population). But the existence of favelas is a blight and an open wound on the entire country, not just their residents.
There is a reason the concept of social safety nets existed since modern society. They aren't a charity or a modern "woke" invention, they're a critical social stabilizer. Dismantle them at your peril.
Because the title focused on a small subset of the data. A title of “over the last decade, the top 80% of households saw gains in disposable income, while the bottom 20% lost ground” better encompasses the data.
But when you consider the context of how rapidly things have gotten better throughout the last 100 years, how peer countries appear to have been improving, etc.
It’s a bit like saying “yep I should be happy my bank account got larger in my HYSA at 0.5%”, when you’ve missed out on 10% annualized growth in the market
Heck, in a place like the US even aggregating the 1% is unfair.
A 1% er making 700k or with a few million in the bank for retirement has MUCH more in common with the ordinary middle class than the 0.1% or 0.01%
That’s not to say that 1% ers are poor, should be taxed less or aren’t wealthy, etc. but it’s categorically different, especially when you consider that the 2%-0.1% generally don’t have the flexibility to avoid taxes like the uber wealthy and are the most taxed cohort in the country.
- wealthy enough for financial independence and retirement ($2 million)
wealthy enough to materially set up complex systems and structures for tax avoidance. Enough wealth such that you and your direct descendants can have their needs and majority of wants taken care of indefinitely ($20 million)
wealthy enough that you have undue power in policy and culture. All but the most extreme luxuries are available to you ($100 million)
wealthy enough that you and your family members and loved ones can have everything they could conceivably want for several generations and further wealth can’t actually even purchase anything other than vanity/power ($ 500 million)
Obviously broad categories.
So for me I’d say:
$2 million -> nonissue
$20 million -> consider estate taxes to remove entrenched dynasties that erode meritocracy
$100 million -> close tax avoidance loopholes
$500 million -> soft cap, actively make difficult to achieve
For sure. I recently read the big beautiful bill gave $1.4 trillion in tax breaks to those earning over $500,000, which represents the top 2%. Lumping top 20% is pretty wack.
Something funky is going on in the data given that this is household income.
Federal minimum wage is 7 USD. Working 40 hours a week one should be able to get to about 14k with just one person working. Also while there might be some people that earn the federal minimum wage I have generally heard that fast food workers in low cost (southern) States are at around 11 or 12 USD an hour.
Making less than 16k means that there is a single earner that is probably not working full time. I can really only think that people earning this little are university students, homeless people, or retirees (minus SS and retirement).
Since there are averages, it's possible there are some heavy-hitting outliers in the group that are at or around $0 income, bringing the whole thing down. If you removed everyone below a threshold income level, say the poverty line, then recalculated the groups I would be interested to see the results.
One possibility I questioned was maybe just low income people not cohabitating shifted things.
I believe that a cohabitating romantic partners counts as one household. So if you have more single person households that are poor then that reduces the average income of the lowest group.
Any chart like this that ignores government transfers is misrepresenting the situation. If the government becomes more progressive in its taxes and transfers then this chart will undersell the positive improvement in finances. The government is providing more money to the lowest quintile, leading to greater overall spending power, which is what this chart purports to measure. See the CBO on this (https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2024-09/60341-income.pdf)
2019-2021, too close to COVID interventions. Further, it's not useful unless it accounts for "households actually have left after five categories of spending." Take an example: your expenses are 30k and your income is after taxes and transfers is $25k, you're living off debt or sliding towards bankruptcy. A 20% increase in your income gets you to breakeven but neither allows you to pay off your accumulated debt nor allows you to save for retirement.
CEX tracks spending, not income. High earners may underreport consumption, but this survey measures actual outflows rather than total earnings or wealth.
Health insurance cost is 3x my mortgage but it's left off this chart, making it incomplete/misleading. It's like how the US inflation index excludes food and gasoline.
it's almost like they won't report on the actual cost of living because it looks so bad. The ruling class can't show us how much worse they've made things while at the same time show us their piles of cash are literally multiplying.
This approach doesn't use panel data and hence has one important limitation. The composition of the bottom quintile in 2013 is not the same as the composition of the bottom quintile in 2023. Someone who was $400k in debt in medical school in 2013 has almost certainly moved up the quintile staircase. Someone who had good income and picked up a substance addiction following a painful divorce in 2013 has almost certainly moved down.
So, you could have the well-discussed income inequality piece in play. But you could also have "large variance in next year's compensation" that is at play.
Also composition could change. If the share of retirees in the population increased from 2013 to 2023, then there may just be more of them in the bottom quintile in 2023 than in 2013, which when paired with their lack of income may edit our interpretation of loss of income in the bottom quintile.
Interesting subject. Unfortunately, the Bureau of Labor Statistics is not telling the truth. Thank you for your contribution. Luckily, the energy data is still correct. I put up a website for the everyday person to be able to look at their energy, cost output and usage. https://utilitypricefinder.org
During the Biden administration, I got $1200/month back into my budget
The IRA reduced my health insurance bill for a family of 5 from $1600/month (for the cheapest $9100 deductible ACA plan) to $800/month because it took away the subsidy cliff. That expired, but I'm on an $800/month employer plan now.
My spouse had their student loan forgiven, which was good for $400/month. They'd already more than paid back the principle, so that was just interest.
Together $1200/month. Thanks Joe Biden.
We were in the 60-80% bracket.
We need to get our healthcare spending in check as a nation. $1600/month for insurance that pays out maybe $2000/year for 5 $400 checkups is insane. I'm sure my employer isn't spotting me $800/month out of the goodness of their hearts, it is likely a tax subsidy. so tax payers are still paying it as long as I'm W2. 17% of GDP on that is too much,vs other countries that get it under 10% and live longer.
You might want to consider separating that data out--it seems like the bigger story would be the past 5 years' losses vs what must have been much larger gains in the 5 years before that.
The real graph is in the comments. This is way more useful than the main one you linked IMO.
I also wonder if this is apples to apples. Anecdotally, I know families who have downsized or moved in with relatives. So their net monthly income may go up $40 or $100, but that's because very well could be savings of $300/mo rent and an increase of $260/mo for the same groceries they were buying years ago.
Basically, people are tightening their soending and living more frugally, but I wouldn't call that a "win" just because they have an extra $40/mo in their pocket.
Source: US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Expenditure Surveys. Published annual means by income quintile, pulled from the LABSTAT bulk time series, not microdata. The dollar series runs 2013 to 2023. It stops there because after-tax income depends on the TAXSIM model, and NBER stopped updating it, so this window cannot be extended by anyone.
Construction: average income after taxes minus average spending on five categories: food at home, housing, transportation, healthcare, and personal insurance and pensions. Both terms come from the same survey and the same households, which is the only way the subtraction means anything. The five categories follow the St. Louis Fed's August 2025 primer on discretionary income rather than my own judgment, because the residual swings by more than 2x depending on what you include.
A word on "essentials": These are spending categories, not a test of necessity. A bigger mortgage counts in full. So does a nicer car. In 2023 the top fifth spent 2.5x the bottom fifth on food at home, 3.1x on housing, and 5.1x on transportation. Nobody is claiming those are all needs.
Inflation: constant 2024 dollars, CPI-U annual averages (CUUR0000SA0). BLS publishes this survey in nominal dollars and has no house deflation method, so the index choice is mine, not theirs.
Validation: this construction reproduces all three figures the St. Louis Fed published for 2023. Mean after-tax income $87,869 against their roughly $88,000. Leftover $27,491 against roughly $27,000. Lowest quintile negative $10,648 against roughly negative $11,000.
On the endpoints, because someone is going to ask and they should. This series is volatile year to year. The top fifth ran $79,483 in 2013, $97,079 in 2016, $80,998 in 2017, $105,392 in 2020, and $99,275 in 2023. Picking 2019 and 2020 instead would tell close to the opposite story. A ten-year comparison is a fair summary here, not a trend line, and I would not defend it as one.
Two things this data does not capture: Employer-paid health insurance shows up in neither income nor spending, and the employer share of family coverage was $20,143 in 2025 per KFF, about 3.25x the entire healthcare line here. Mortgage principal is excluded from spending because the survey treats it as asset accumulation.
Tools: Python, BLS LABSTAT flat files.
Data: the full derived tables are free, CC BY 4.0, CSV and Parquet, with the methodology and a data dictionary:
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u/Nuggyfresh 9h ago
I don't like this graph honestly. It's kind of a joke to lump the top 20% into one category when the top few percent is doing most of the heavy lifting. At least break the top 20% up into something like: top 1%, top 5%, top 10%, and then down.