Comment by pessimizer

The top 10% incomes have tons of assets, especially homes.

Saying that billionaires "disproportionately" have more assets than non-billionaires is a tautology that says nothing. You might as well say that tall people have disproportionately more height than people who are not tall. Billionaire is a statement about wealth, not income.

> In fact wage growth for the top decile has been recently slower than bottom deciles

Which is a very good thing, but also doesn't address anything. The bottom deciles live from their wages. The top decile either put most of their wages into assets, are already so wealthy that their wages don't matter, or live in luxury they can't afford.

The macroeconomic purpose of inflation as a tool is to lower the wages of high wage earners - because socially you can't really lower people's wages, at best you can refuse refuse them raises. It's easy to raise the income of lower deciles to offset inflation, either through legislation or safety net. Middle-high wage earners who do nothing under inflation face an effective pay cut.

> The guy who's at the 9.99th percentile is a normal salaried worker not doing better.

He is not normal, he is in the top 10%. His income triples or quadruples a median income. He is of course not doing better than himself, but he is doing better than 90% of other people by definition.