How Car-Reliance Squeezes the Middle Class

Over at Wonkblog, Max Ehrenfreund breaks down how the rich and poor really spend their money, using a great new dataset from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that splits Americans into income deciles (ten equal-sized groupings). But the stats also show how the middle-class spend their money, and when it comes to annual transportation expenditures, the results are pretty alarming.

In the basic-necessity categories of food and housing, the numbers align in predictable ways. The rich spend more in these areas, but this spending also accounts for a lower share of overall annual household expenditures—with the reverse true for low-income Americans. So, in the chart below, the columns representing food and housing expenses climb, just as the lines representing those costs as shares of total household expenditures slope down: