THREEFOLD INCREASE BY THE RICH IN SPENDING ON THEIR CHILDREN

“Timothy Smeeding, a professor of public affairs and economics at the University of Wisconsin, has explored how the top quintile is pulling away from the rest of society. In an essay published earlier this year ‘Gates, Gaps, and Intergenerational Mobility: The Importance of an Even Start,’ Smeeding finds that the gap between the average income of households with children in the top quintile and households with children in the middle quintile has grown, in inflation-adjusted dollars, from $68,600 to $169,300 — that’s 147 percent.

“In an earlier paper, Smeeding and two co-authors wrote that:

“ ‘we have seen a threefold increase between 1972 and 2007 in top-decile spending on children, an increase that suggests that parents at the top may be investing in ever more high-quality day care and babysitting, private schooling, books and tutoring, and college tuition and fees.’

“The bottom line, Smeeding wrote in an email, is this:

“‘The well-to-do are isolated from the day to day struggles of the middle class and below to provide these key services (health, education, job search and other opportunities) to aid the upward mobility of their children. But the upper middle class are happy to take advantage of tax subsidies for their own housing, preschool for their kids, and saving for college which benefit them.’”

Thomas B. Edsall, “How the Other Fifth Lives,” New York Times, April 27, 2016, Op-Ed Page.