Homeowners have nearly 40x the wealth of renters. what's causing the wealth gap?(usatoday.com)
usatoday.com
Homeowners have nearly 40x the wealth of renters. what's causing the wealth gap?
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/real-estate/2024/12/02/renter-wealth-gap-homeowners-why/76701474007/
6 comments
In other news, yacht owners were found to be far wealthier than folks who take the bus to their hourly-pay jobs every day.
Or put differently, few of the fairly wealthy non-home-owners buy homes (which would bring the gap down from four thousand per cent). That's odd, isn't it? Why not?
The analysis already controls against the ultra-wealthy distorting the "homeowner" net-worth numbers: It uses median instead of average.
I can manufacture a netw orth of average Anerican homeowner with a bit of paperwork. Legal fictions are wonderful things. Statistically invisible if you aren't combing the right datasets.
I reiterate: The median-measure makes that irrelevant.
Sure, perhaps someone like Jeff Bezos might spend a million to employ a crack-squad of devious mercenary accountant-lawyers to disguise his apparent net-worth... But shifting from a top-1% "homeowner" down to top-10%, or top-20%, or even top-49.999%? That has zero effect on the final result.
In other words, the kind of people with a motive+capability to hide their net-worth are very unlikely to ever disguise it all the way down to <=$400k, and the people who are truly at <$400k simply don't have enough motive+capability to try the same tricks.
Sure, perhaps someone like Jeff Bezos might spend a million to employ a crack-squad of devious mercenary accountant-lawyers to disguise his apparent net-worth... But shifting from a top-1% "homeowner" down to top-10%, or top-20%, or even top-49.999%? That has zero effect on the final result.
In other words, the kind of people with a motive+capability to hide their net-worth are very unlikely to ever disguise it all the way down to <=$400k, and the people who are truly at <$400k simply don't have enough motive+capability to try the same tricks.
Capitalism