Prática de Shadowing: Living Paycheck to Paycheck? So Is Everyone Else - Aprenda a falar inglês com vídeo
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63 % of Americans live paycheck to paycheck.
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Given the high cost of living and the financial pressures most
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Americans are under right now, that's not exactly a shock.
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What is surprising though is that according to a Goldman Sachs survey, 40 % of working
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Americans earning over $500 ,000 a year say they're living paycheck to paycheck too.
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Now, the survey defined living paycheck to paycheck as finding it tough to make progress on any long -term financial goals,
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not necessarily as running out of cash before payday, But in a way, that's the point.
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Someone can be earning half a million dollars a year
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and still genuinely feel like they're running on a treadmill and struggling to keep up.
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Now, that may sound like a problem most people would happily trade their own problems for.
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But there's a lot more going on here than rich people feeling a bit poor.
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Because high earners like these sit at the top of a
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much larger group whose spending has become increasingly important to the entire US economy.
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The top 20 % of American earners now account for roughly 60 % of all consumer spending in the country,
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up from about 50 % in the 1990s.
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Meanwhile, everyone else has less money left to spend after covering basic expenses.
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That means the US economy depends heavily on spending by a relatively small share of households.
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And if those households start feeling less financially secure and cut back, the effects can spread to businesses and workers across the economy.
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And there's an even bigger story hiding underneath all of this,
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one related to how this situation extends even further and affects the global economy as well.
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But to understand how American spending became so important, not just at home but around the world,
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we need to look at how the global economy works.
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So why does someone earning half a million dollars a year in the US still feel broke
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and has it always been this way?
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Is all that spending actually good for the economy and why has so much of it come to depend on wealthy households?
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And finally, what happens to the rest of the world if Americans stop spending?
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I haven't been to the doctor for even a simple checkup in years.
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And quite honestly, the only reason I go to the dentist every six months is
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that they make sure I book the next appointment before I leave their office.
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Scheduling a visit to the doctor can feel like a monstrous task, especially for something as simple as a checkup.
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And more often than not, when you do finally call them, they can't take your appointment for three weeks.
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That's where today's sponsor, ZocDoc, comes in.
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I don't know about you, but I kind of thought you just showed up and got the doctor that was available.
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They also cut down the wait time, with appointments usually happening within 24 to 72 hours of scheduling,
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making it even faster and more convenient than my dentist.
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Honestly, it's hard to say for certain if the paycheck economy has always been this bad, because surveys all ask the question slightly differently.
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But the comparisons we do have are pretty striking.
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Back in 2012, only around 12 % of workers earning over $100 ,000 said they lived paycheck to paycheck.
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This year it was 41 % of people earning between $100 ,000 and $250 ,000.
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Now, these numbers are drawn from different surveys and $100 ,000 doesn't buy what it did in 2012.
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But still, that's a big jump.
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So are Americans actually worse off than they used to be?
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Well, not exactly.
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American households are actually in better shape than they were a decade ago.
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In 2013 about half of adults couldn't cover a surprise $400 expense with cash.
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By 2025 that was down to 37%.
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And when Bank of America looked at actual account data rather than asking people how they felt,
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it found that only around a quarter of households spend almost everything they earn on necessities.
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So what seems to have gotten worse is the feeling.
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Expectations have shifted, and for high earners especially, what they feel they need has crept closer and closer to what they actually make.
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So how does that happen?
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Okay, let's say you've just landed a job paying half a million dollars a year.
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Congratulations, you're now in the top few percent of American earners, and you're probably already looking at houses.
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But you're almost certainly not looking at houses in Ohio.
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Jobs that pay this kind of money are heavily concentrated in a handful of extremely expensive metro areas, like New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles.
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Places where the cost of living eats into your income before anything else does.
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Rent and mortgage payments in these cities can easily run $5 ,000 to $10 ,000 a month for a family.
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Which sounds absurd, but
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that is just what housing costs in the parts of these cities where high earners tend to live and as an Australian,
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I'm really in no position to judge anyone else's housing market.
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And then the taxman shows up.
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A high income means a high tax bracket, and depending on the state,
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a big slice of that $500 ,000 never even makes it to a bank account, let alone a savings account.
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But for this income group, the cost of living and taxes aren't the whole story.
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For lower earners, those are the binding constraints, the things that decide whether you can make ends meet.
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For someone at $500 ,000, the bigger driver is something more behavioral.
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Something called lifestyle creep, the phenomenon where luxuries gradually start to feel like necessities as your income rises.
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When you earn $500 ,000 a year, you stop comparing yourself to the median household and start comparing yourself to the people around you.
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And in those expensive metro areas, the people around you might be earning 2 or 5 or 10 times what you make.
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So things that are objectively luxuries, like business class travel, private school for the kids, or a renovation on an already very nice home,
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start feeling like baseline requirements just to keep up with the Zuckerbergs.
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Once those expectations are baked in, it's easy to see how $500 ,000 disappears is.
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Each individual purchase from high -end healthcare to a dog with its own personal trainer feels reasonable in context,
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but together they add up to a lifestyle that eats up almost everything coming in.
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These spending patterns create something quite interesting economically.
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They build very intense, very isolated pockets of consumption,
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almost like localized inflation, where a restaurant dinner can easily cost $300 or $400 in one part of the country,
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but would be a fraction of that anywhere else.
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Then there's the debt.
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A lot of high earners take on large mortgages or car payments that assume the high income will keep coming indefinitely,
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which is a risky bet if that income is tied to a volatile industry or a single employer.
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For some, the debt starts as student loans.
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The classic example is the doctor
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or lawyer who spent a decade racking up debt to get the degree that eventually got them the big salary,
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and who's still paying off that debt well into their peak earning years.
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For others, it's plain old consumer debt.
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Even in the top 10 % of earners, a group with a median income of about $390 ,000,
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roughly 1 in 4 still carry a credit card balance from month to month.
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Wealthy people do have more things to spend their money on these days,
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but they've also never found it easier to borrow the money they need to buy them.
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Now, rich people spending more and more money should be good for the economy, right?
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More spending means more revenue for businesses, which means more jobs, which means higher GDP.
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Well, yes, sort of.
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You want money recirculating through an economy rather than sitting idle.
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But anyone who's ever been stuck in the mud knows that spinning your wheels faster doesn't necessarily get you anywhere.
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And the end goal of an economy isn't just to spin its wheels.
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The end goal isn't spending.
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It's raising living standards.
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And how you actually achieve that is a bit more complicated than just getting people to spend.
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Here's a quick thought experiment.
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Let's say my producer Ryan is really rich, our writer Marina is middle class, and I'm poor.
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What's the best way to make all three of us better off?
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Do you let Ryan get even richer on the theory that he'll invest it, come up with better ideas,
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and will all benefit from his technological breakthroughs?
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Or do you shift some of those resources towards
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Marina and me?
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If I finally get my first car, I can get to work,
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earn an income, and take part in the economy in a way I couldn't before.
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If Ryan gets his tenth car, one he'll probably drive twice a year, the economy registers a similar amount of spending,
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but the actual improvement in someone's life is completely different.
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There's no perfect formula for balancing those levers.
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It's the classic economist answer.
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It depends.
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But as unsatisfactory as this answer seems, it gets at something really important.
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We measure spending to calculate GDP, but spending was never really the point.
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GDP is meant to measure the value of the goods and services a country produces.
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One way to measure that is to look at where those goods and services end up.
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Take a car built in the US.
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If a household buys it, that counts as consumption.
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If the government buys it for an employee, that counts as government spending.
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If it's sold overseas, it counts as an export.
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And if it's built but hasn't sold yet, it counts as an addition to inventory which falls under investment.
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That's where the familiar formula comes from.
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Consumption plus investment plus government spending plus exports minus imports.
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We subtract imports because the other spending categories include things produced abroad.
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So when we calculate GDP this way, we're using spending and changes in inventory to measure production.
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The spending figures tell us how much the economy produced and where that output went.
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So GDP is a decent rough proxy for production.
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But because the spending number is the one everyone watches,
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there's a tendency to hear we need to boost consumer spending and assume that's always a good thing.
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In the short term, there are benefits to this kind of thinking.
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If people have some extra cash and they go out and recirculate it, that creates jobs and gets the economic engine turning.
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But it matters when they spend it too.
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During a downturn, businesses may have workers and equipment sitting idle because customers aren't buying enough.
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In that situation, additional spending can help bring that capacity back into use.
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So spending really can help in a downturn when everyone is hoarding cash at the same time.
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But despite what a lot of people think, when it comes to the very wealthy, the economy doesn't actually need them to spend more.
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Wealthy households spend a smaller share of each extra dollar they earn.
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Economists call this a low marginal propensity to consume.
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But even spending a smaller share, they already command an enormous amount of resources.
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If anything, arguably, they already consume too much.
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Imagine a superyacht.
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When a billionaire buys one for their own personal enjoyment, that can represent anywhere from 50 to 150 million dollars in resources.
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That represents an enormous amount of skilled labor from engineers and artisans, plus huge pieces of machinery, specialized tooling and electrical systems.
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With the average new home in the US costing around $428 ,000 to build, that means the same money could have built well over 100 homes.
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Now, the standard defense is that building a yacht creates jobs, and that's true.
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But building houses with those same resources would have employed just as many people.
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And at the end of the process, you'd have homes for well over 100 families,
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instead of a boat for one person and a few of their closest friends.
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Through the lens of GDP, the yacht and the hypothetical homes look identical.
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You only see the difference once you stop watching the spending number and look at what was actually built,
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who benefits, and what real things exist in the world afterwards.
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And because GDP trains us to focus on spending rather than outcomes,
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this kind of allocation hardly ever gets flagged as a problem in standard economic thinking.
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Now to be fair, earning $500 ,000 a year doesn't put you in the super yacht club, but the same principle applies at every income level.
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What people spend their money on matters just as much as how much they spend.
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Which leaves us with a bit of a paradox.
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More spending by the very wealthy wouldn't do much to improve most people's lives,
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but so many jobs depend on their spending that a sudden cutback could hurt people across the economy.
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Remember that stat from earlier about the top 20 % of earners now accounting for almost 60 % of all consumer spending?
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That's the highest share since Moody started tracking it back in 1989.
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And the spending of that top group sits on a surprisingly shaky foundation.
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The wealthiest 10 % of American households own close to 90 % of all US stock market wealth.
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They aren't exactly the same households as the top 10 % of earners, but there's substantial overlap.
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And their spending depends not just on their paychecks, but on how rich they feel when they check their investment portfolios.
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This is what economists call the wealth effect.
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When the stock market goes up, people feel richer and spend more freely.
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When it drops, they feel poorer and pull back.
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So if the market takes a serious hit and that group collectively decides to tighten their belts, the damage spreads well beyond their own household budgets.
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They drag the rest of the economy down with them, because their spending is someone else's income.
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When a top 10 % household eats out at a restaurant, that money becomes wages for a server.
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When they send a kid to private school, it's tuition revenue that pays a teacher's salary.
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And each of those people then spends a portion of what they just earned on groceries, rent, or filling up their car,
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and the money keeps rippling outward through the economy.
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So, if a big chunk of high earners cut back at the same time, the businesses that depend on their spending suffer first.
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The workers at those businesses, who are now earning less or losing hours, then cut back on their spending too,
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which hits the next layer of businesses, and so on.
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That's a standard multiplier effect, and it happens to some degree in every downturn.
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What makes this particular setup more fragile than usual is that there isn't much of a cushion underneath.
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For decades, pay for typical workers barely moved.
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In 1979, median full -time weekly earnings were about $335.
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By 2016, in inflation -adjusted dollars, they were $345.
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They've picked up since to around $378 this year, but housing, healthcare, and childcare have swallowed up a lot of those gains,
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and many households are spending far more than they're saving.
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That habit has been about 50 years in the making, and for a lot of that time, the government has actively encouraged it.
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Think about the messaging during economic downturns.
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After 9 -11, President Bush urged
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Americans to keep traveling and spending, famously telling them to get down to Disney World.
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In early 2008, the government sent out rebate checks designed to give the economy a boost.
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And over time, people have generalized the guidance into a broader assumption that spending is always a good thing.
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The problem is that spend more is supposed to be emergency medicine for a downturn.
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If you have a headache, you take a painkiller.
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But if you're perfectly healthy, you don't keep loading up on painkillers just because they made you feel good last time.
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And yet the American personal savings rate has fallen from around
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9 % in the early 1990s to around 5 % over the past year, and it dropped below 3 % in the mid -2000s,
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right before the financial crisis.
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Meanwhile, credit card debt has climbed to about $1 .2 trillion,
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which suggests the US economy has basically been on that medicine more or less permanently for decades, well beyond the emergency situation it was designed for.
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And that raises a bigger question.
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How did the United States end up with an economy that seems to depend on people consuming as much as humanly possible?
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The answer only really makes sense once you zoom out from America entirely.
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When it comes to how their economies are structured, the US and China are almost mirror images of each other.
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In the US, household spending alone accounts for about 68 % of GDP.
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In China, it's about 40%.
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Add in government spending on services like healthcare and defence, and total final consumption in the US is 81 % of the entire economy,
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while in China it's 57%.
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People in China want nice things just as much as anyone else.
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The difference is that relative to how much the country produces, Chinese households simply don't spend enough to absorb all of it.
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China is the manufacturing powerhouse of the world.
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It accounts for around 27 % of global manufacturing output more than any other country at a speed
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and scale that is genuinely hard to overstate.
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So why don't Chinese households spend more?
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Well, for a few reasons
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that reinforce each other for starters historical forces may have made many of them more cautious borrowers credit is available
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but credit card use is still relatively low compared to the
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us people in china also typically have much lower incomes than americans even after accounting for differences in living costs
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and then there's a cultural
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and behavioral factor chinese households tend to be far more financially conservative saving
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and investing for the next generation rather than spending today
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Expectations about future expenses, family responsibilities and financial security influence how much people save.
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China's history of widespread poverty may contribute to those attitudes, but most Americans haven't experienced this kind of poverty, at least not at the same scale,
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which is part of why many
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Americans don't feel the same instinctive pull towards saving.
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And that has global consequences.
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If a country produces far more than its people buy, the surplus has to go somewhere.
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For a long time, a big chunk of it landed in America since the tariffs
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less of it does at least directly the u .s goods
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deficit with china fell to about 202 billion dollars in 2025
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and around 150 billion dollars worth of chinese exports were redirected to southeast asia africa the gulf
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and latin america some still reach the u .s indirectly routed through third countries
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or in small parcels that official data undercounts
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but overall the u .s still imports far more than it exports it's flooded with cheap imported goods
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and american consumers particularly the wealthier ones end up playing the role of buyer of last resort for the world's excess production.
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So Americans' habit of consuming a lot of stuff is partly a personal choice, and yes, partly a cultural thing, but it's also partly structural.
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At a macroeconomic level, someone has to absorb what the world's factories make, and this has fallen to American consumers.
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But why the US specifically?
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Well, a big part of the answer is the dollar.
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Because the US dollar is the world's reserve currency, investors, companies, and central banks around the world want to hold American assets.
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Things like US government bonds, shares, and property.
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So the dollars America spends on imports flows straight back into the US as investment.
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That helps keep borrowing cheap and makes it easy for America to keep buying more than it sells.
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Which means the United States is, to a large extent, structurally stuck with the role of being the world's buyer.
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Meanwhile, half a million dollars a year goes extraordinarily far in China.
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At roughly 7 yuan to the dollar, $500 ,000 is close to 77 times the median disposable income.
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So in most of the country, that money would be enough to live comfortably for years without working.
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In the United States though, that same income can leave someone feeling like they're living paycheck to paycheck.
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Now, people earning half a million dollars a year aren't the only ones feeling stretched.
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Further down the income ladder, the middle class is going through its own version of this, just without a $400 dinner to drown their sorrows in.
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In fact, if you rebuilt the US poverty line using the same formula it was built on in the 1960s,
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a family of four would need something like $130 ,000 a year just to clear it.
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We already made an entire video on why that is, which you should be able to click to on your screen now.
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Vocabulário e dicas de fala para esta lição
Esta aula de conversação usa o vídeo “Living Paycheck to Paycheck? So Is Everyone Else”. As palavras que mais se repetem: spending, economy, household, spend, dollar. Este vídeo tem 255 frases e 3495 palavras para praticar shadowing. A fala dura 17:27. O falante fala rápido, cerca de 200 palavras por minuto, então espere sons ligados e reduzidos. 83% das palavras estão entre as 3.000 mais comuns do inglês; vale a pena estudar o restante antes de começar.
Vocabulário principal deste vídeo
15 palavras do vídeo que vale a pena aprender, com pronúncia e significado:
| Palavra | Pronúncia | Significado |
|---|---|---|
| household adjetivo | /ˈhaʊshoʊld/ | familiar |
| earn verbo | /ɝn/ | receber |
| wealthy adjetivo | /ˈwɛl.θi/ | rico |
| import substantivo | /ˈɪm.pɔɹt/ | importados |
| consumption substantivo | /kənˈsʌmp.ʃən/ | consumo |
| export substantivo | /ˈɛks.pɔɹt/ | exportado |
| depend verbo | /dɪˈpɛnd/ | depender |
| median substantivo | /ˈmiː.di.ən/ | mediano, mediana |
| consume verbo | /kənˈsum/ | consumir |
| meanwhile advérbio | /ˈmiːnwaɪl/ | ao mesmo tempo, simultaneamente |
| poverty substantivo | /ˈpɑːvɚti/ | pobreza |
| compare verbo | /kəmˈpɛɚ/ | comparar |
| formula substantivo | /ˈfɔː.mjʊ.lə/ | fórmula |
| roughly advérbio | /ˈɹʌf.li/ | rudemente, precariamente |
| partly advérbio | /ˈpɑɹtli/ | em parte |
Phrasal verbs que você vai ouvir
| Palavra | Significado |
|---|---|
| end up verbo | terminar, acabar |
| come up with verbo | pensar (em), alcançar |
| fill up verbo | encher |
| go out verbo | sair |
| go up verbo | subir |
| keep up verbo | manter |
| pay off verbo | compensar |
| pick up verbo | pegar |
Gramática neste vídeo
As estruturas que o falante mais usa, com as palavras exatas do vídeo:
| Estrutura | No vídeo |
|---|---|
| Present perfect have/has + particípio passado — uma ação passada que ainda importa agora | has become · has it always been · haven't been |
| Voz passiva be + particípio passado — o foco está no que acontece, não em quem faz | are drawn · are baked · been stuck |
Pronúncia para ficar de olho
O falante usa 40 contrações e formas reduzidas, como don't, aren't, doesn't. Diga-as na forma curta, do jeito que você ouve.
- Os sons de “th”: wealthy /ˈwɛl.θi/, underneath /ˌʌndɚˈniθ/, southeast /sawˈθɪjst/, tenth /tɛnθ/
- Os sons de “sh” e “zh”: consumption /kənˈsʌmp.ʃən/, expectation /ˌɛk.spɛkˈteɪ.ʃən/, luxury /ˈlʌk.ʃə.ɹi/, inflation /ɪnˈfleɪ.ʃən/, shock /ʃɔk/
- Palavras longas — acerte a sílaba tônica: expectation /ˌɛk.spɛkˈteɪ.ʃən/, necessarily /ˌnɛs.əˈsɛɹ.ə.li/, genuinely /ˈd͡ʒɛn.ju.ɪn.li/, necessity /nɪˈsɛsəti/, economist /iˈkɑ.nə.mɪst/
Sons difíceis para falantes de português:
- Consoante final — sem acrescentar um “i” depois: household /ˈhaʊshoʊld/, import /ˈɪm.pɔɹt/, export /ˈɛks.pɔɹt/, depend /dɪˈpɛnd/, yacht /jɑt/
- /l/ final — a língua toca o céu da boca, não vira “u”: meanwhile /ˈmiːnwaɪl/, lifestyle /ˈlaɪfˌstaɪl/, behavioral /bɪˈheɪvjəɹəl/, idle /ˈaɪd(ə)l/, electrical /ɪˈlɛktɹɪkəl/
- /h/ — um sopro suave, diferente do “r”: household /ˈhaʊshoʊld/, habit /ˈhæb.ɪt/, behavioral /bɪˈheɪvjəɹəl/, handful /ˈhæn(d)fʊl/, happily /ˈhæp.ə.li/
Como praticar com este vídeo
- Ouça o vídeo inteiro uma vez sem falar e anote as palavras que você não conhece.
- Comece na velocidade 0,75×, faça shadowing frase por frase e volte à velocidade normal quando ficar fácil.
- Grave a sua voz e compare com o original, prestando atenção a palavras como household, earn, wealthy.
O que é a Técnica de Shadowing?
Shadowing é uma técnica de aprendizado de idiomas com base científica, originalmente desenvolvida para o treinamento de intérpretes profissionais. O método é simples, mas poderoso: você ouve áudio em inglês nativo e repete imediatamente em voz alta — como uma sombra seguindo o falante com 1-2 segundos de atraso. Pesquisas mostram melhora significativa na precisão da pronúncia, entonação, ritmo, sons conectados, compreensão auditiva e fluência na fala.