“The $45m he spent to fight this would’ve allowed us to renovate this school. The $12b he’d owe would let us renovate 100 schools. Or get X thousand of the homeless off the streets. Or fixed 10 million potholes.”
Make his name responsible for those things not happening.
To my knowledge, those two are the only citizens known to have been killed in her district though. Which y’know. Is what the article is talking about in this particular instance.
For those curious as to additional reading, the origin of the 4% rule comes from the Trinity Study, a finance research project from the late 90s.
Not to be confused with the Trinity Test, which occurred in the 40s and had very little to do with finance.
I hate when these sorts of statistics point to “the top 10%” as the problem based on numbers like this. It’s simply much less broad than that. Of all wealth, the top 0.1% holds 14.5%. The next 0.9% holds 17.3%. The bottom 50% hold only 2.5%. The top 1% of households hold 12.72x as much wealth as the bottom 50%. And, notably, the bottom 10% of households have less than $1000 in net worth. The bottom 8% of people have $0 or less.
A household which is at the 90th percentile for Net Worth has a net worth of roughly $2,000,000, including equity in their home. You get to the 95th percentile before you double that to $4M. The 90th percentile has 1000x higher net worth than someone with $2,000 to their name, which seems obscenely unfair when described in that way. However, a net worth of $2,000,000 would provide a retiree a mostly-safe withdrawal rate (4% or $80,000) of around the median income of ~$84,000. (This doesn’t actually check out since it includes equity in the home, but as a simplification.) Retirees have access to social security and tax-advantaged accounts and the like, but someone who ends up with a net worth of $2M could live only a median lifestyle without working.
Is a net worth of $2,000,000 a very large number and a large chunk of wealth? Of course it is. But it’s not like, obscene wealth. If I gave a random American $2M it would change their lives profoundly, but the people who have a net worth of $2M aren’t the ones who are ruining our lives. They’re just not.
The top 0.1% hold 14.5% of the wealth. The top 1% hold 31.8%. The bottom 10% hold less than 0%. That’s the ball game.
Disclaimer: I have not rigorously cited my sources, nor verified all my figuring. However, most of this is pulled from the Fed data linked in the article. Other stuff is pulled from sources which cite the same, though I’ve not run a rigorous analysis of the maths. My work should not be cited as correct, it is intended to be illustrative. That said, I’ll happily remedy any errors that others might notice!
The article links the source data from the FED, which has data since 1989
https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z1/dataviz/dfa/distribute/chart/#quarter:144;series:Net worth;demographic:networth;population:1,3,5,7,9;units:levels
Trump probably just wants their advice for how to sell it to Christians.
A lot of these calculations solve this by using a lower expected growth rate, to offset the expected inflation. It lets you have the more simple conversations in today’s currency values, which are easier to reason about.
That’s not the case in this particular example, and you’ve correctly identified a deficiency. I raise the point for the benefit of any curious readers who look into other conversations on the topic.