Boomers vs. Gen X: Who’s the Wealthiest of Them All?

This tweet has been making the rounds:

One of my readers emailed this to me and asked if it was for real. I promised to look into it.

The short answer is yes, it’s true. It’s based on the Fed’s Survey of Consumer Finances, which is a pretty reliable set of data, and the numbers are accurate. Boomers at age 35 held a much larger share of national wealth than Gen Xers did when they turned 35 a decade ago.

So what’s going on? Is there really such a huge gap? I think probably not, and it has to do with the huge increase in income inequality over the past few decades. Compared to 1989, a much larger share of national wealth is tied up in the wealth of the very rich these days, and Gen X isn’t yet old enough to have a big share of that. It’s mostly boomers—either by inheritance or by simple accumulation—who control that wealth. If you look at median wealth instead, the difference between boomers and Xers would be much smaller.

That’s my guess, anyway, but I can’t find the data to support it. It’s probably out there somewhere, though. Can anyone help us out here?

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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