Prof. Baker
While i agree with your core argument, i am afraid that i must disagree with some of your statistics. The MEAN household income is less then 70k, the MEDIAN is around 50k, with a 3/5 mean of $49,842 in 2011. http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/data/historical/household/
While i fully concur with the idea that household spending as a portion of income is to high, i feel strongly that this is not a spending problem but a income problem. If HH median income where 70k, households could spend at current levels and save nearly 30%. Where household to save merely 20% ( a four fold increase from today) we would see a groundswell in consumer spending.
I would like to take a moment to inform you (and the economics community at large) that i have found MAJOR discrepancies in the BEA's statistics on income. Both the census and the Social Security peg mean personal income at around $40,000, however if you divide BEA's total wages by their Full + Part time labor force, you end up with a mean of $48602 (I will not even go into OECD calling mean wages at $54000, which is frankly absurd). Could you possibly write an article or post on this? As discussions of inequality and wage rigidity move forward, have accurate stats is going to be critical, it does not help to have means and medians all over the map. - Lrellok
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