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ECONOMIC PREDICTION ASTRAY
Michael Moore two years ago:
Listen, friends, you have to face the truth: you are never going to be rich. The chance of that happening is about one in a million. Not only are you never going to be rich, but you are going to have to live the rest of your life busting your butt just to pay the cable bill and the music and art classes for your kid at the public school where they used to be free.
And reality today:
The number of millionaires in the U.S. increased to a record last year, boosted by gains in stocks and global financial markets, according to two new studies.
The number of U.S. households with a net worth of $1 million or more rose 21% in 2004, according to a survey released yesterday by Spectrem Group, a wealth-research firm in Chicago. It is the largest increase since 1998, according to the study, which was based on data from more than 450 qualified respondents. There now are 7.5 million millionaire households in the U.S., breaking the record set in 1999 of 7.1 million.
Hope these poor bastards can keep up with their cable payments.
Most people won’t get rich, but that does not include Moore. I think he is P.T. Barnum come back from the dead and he knows there is a sucker born every minute.
I mean, is Moore going to give me all his money or what? Is he going to move into a monestary and take a vow of poverty and give his millions to embryonic stem cell research or something?
Can that stat be right? 7.5 million millionaire households in a population of 300 million. Ignoring the different units, to err on the side of caution, we get one out of every 40 people live in a millionaire household.
So all things being equal (which clearly they’re not, but for the sake of argument), you have a one in 40 chance of living like in millionaire in the States.
Which would mean Moore is off only by a factor of 25,000. Which is pretty good, by his standards of truth and honesty.
Posted by Crispytoast on 2005 05 29 at 10:28 AM • permalinkI think that one in 40 Americans can easily live in a millionaire household. The fact is, if you have at least a high five-figure job (or two) in the household, put money away in your 401k diligently, and bought a house in an area that has appreciated significantly in this booming housing market, a million is not at all a hard figure to reach over, say, 20 years. You don’t have a million dollars in ready cash, but you have a million in net worth.
The one I saw the other day was that there are 430,000 Americans worth $10 million or more. To me that’s the real difference between the rich and other people, you CAN’T get to $10 million just by owning one home and putting money away at a normal 9-to-5 job. That there are enough people who have made those kinds of bucks as investors, entrepreneurs, whatever to entirely populate a town the size of Wichita, Kansas or Fresno, California is amazing.
“You have to face the truth: you are never going to be rich.”
This prediction turned out to be quite accurate in my case.
Posted by harry hutton on 2005 05 29 at 11:46 AM • permalinkHow many working homeless are there?
Well, actually…. more than a few. Homeless, yes. But not in the sense meant by the Compassion Nazis.
Posted by nofixedabode on 2005 05 29 at 01:49 PM • permalinkMike G—what makes it even more amazing is that the study seems to have not counted the merely “house-rich”:
“...The study excluded the value of primary residences, but included second homes and other real estate.”
(!)
Posted by Evan Kirchhoff on 2005 05 29 at 04:45 PM • permalinkCase in point: 450 respondents means that each of them stands for more than 200,000 real households. Maybe I’m missing something, but a statement like “there now are 7.5 million millionaire households in the U.S., breaking the record set in 1999 of 7.1 million” seems somewhat worthless to me when the change of 400,000 rides on only 2 respondents answering differently than in 1999, especially if the group of respondents is a different one now.
Funny how Mikey doesn’t mention busting your butt to pay the friggin’ taxes that are supposed to pay for all those classes, but instead somehow wind up somewhere else.
It would be lot easier to pay the bills if 40% of my gross wasn’t being hoovered up by sticky-fingered bureaucrats who know better than me what to do with it.
Kywong, when you say things like that, you need to provide links to proof. People here (as you will soon discover) aren’t particularly intimidated by big words like “statistically,” even when you bold them.
Posted by Andrea Harris, Administrator on 2005 05 30 at 11:33 PM • permalinkkywong:
Using just the numbers here, and the riposte “Hope these poor bastards can keep up with their cable payments”, I arrive at this:
There are 75 million households in the US (took the number 300 million Americans and added my own assumption that there are 4 in a household), subtracted the 7.1 mil. millionaire households in 1999. Then I took 66,666 as the per year figure of new millionaires (400,000 in the six years since), multiplied it by a 45 yr. working life and got a 4.42% chance of a non-millionaire household joining the ranks of the millionaires.
While it’s hard to do a straight comparison, I do have to think that “I hope they can afford cable” is more honest than “they have a 0.0001% chance of becoming a millionaires.”
Am I missing something?
Posted by tim maguire on 2005 05 31 at 11:45 AM • permalinkRe #20
Byrd
Nice analysis but…
I can’t see any evidence that Moore is addressing households. It looks to me as if he’s addressing individuals.
Your calculations (welll considered as they are) ignore growth in population over a 45 year working life and the effects of inflation on the current value of $1M. (A million dollars just ain’t what it used to be.)
No doubt Moore’s “one in a million” quote is not meant to be taken literally - I read it to mean he just thinks the odds are extremely long. This is, I believe, much closer to the mark than Tim’s attempted rebuttal.
Well, since we are talking about a nation where the poor (one notch about homeless, WomButtHead) generally have food, a car, TV, and a place to live, I would not worry about reaching millionaire status. That’s becaus ein other nations, “poor” means going hungry more often than not.
And also because, in America these days, “millionaire” is defined by net worth, not cash in hand. My home town has more millionaires than you would believe, simply due to the land those farmers own.
Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2005 06 01 at 10:52 PM • permalink
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Ha, what about “Big M”? Did you hear he was arrested at Dulles airport for having 10 pounds of crack appearing out of his pants? Seriously, if he can become a multi-millionaire, it should serve as a beacon to anyone with half a brain, that indeed, anyhting is possible.