COMMENTARY | Strictly speaking, the 1 percent -- people whose incomes put them above the other 99 percent of us, starting at about $340,000 a year as of 2009, according to IRS data -- don't actually spend much of their money.
It's not just a "responsibility" thing, where the reason they're rich is because we spend and they don't. It's because it only costs so much to get the essentials, or even the best of everything. Electronics are an especially democratized market. Apple makes the best examples of pretty much every category it's in, and while your mileage may vary as to whether they're worth the price, a loaded iMac is still within reach of most people with credit cards (and jobs).
Food, health care and housing only cost so much because there's only so much one person needs. So what the 1 percent do with most of their money is sit on it. They invest it, or pay people to invest it, in things like companies that lay off their workers or destroy people's retirement savings or have more cash on hand than the government already, and don't need any more to begin with. They do that to make more money, so they can sit on amounts that would change thousands of people's lives if they spent any of it. And they tell each other they deserve it because they are better than you.
That's what they spend their money on
Not the essentials; tens of millions of people need food stamps to afford peanut butter and jelly, but they have all the food they want. And you probably can't afford health care without going bankrupt, but they have it from cradle to grave.
Not the best; the difference between the best things you can afford and the best things they can afford are, a lot of the time, subjective. And the higher you climb into the middle class, the more subjective things get.
They buy things that remind them how much better they are than you. Like watches that can't tell the time any better than yours, and don't look any better than a $500 timepiece, but that cost more than you'll make in your lifetime. Like stereo systems that cost more than a year's salary for you, and are literally powered by the placebo effect. But they're sure they can tell the difference between their stuff and yours, because you just don't have the net worth to appreciate theirs.
After all, if you could, then what good would it be for them to have it?
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