Every few years we have to deal with another one of those tiresome "War on Christmas" media memes. Yet this year the war appears to be real—and a sky-high number of Americans are registering themselves as conscientious objectors:
This holiday, 11.5% of people plan to sit out the season by not spending anything on presents, gift cards or other items for entertaining, according to a survey by Deloitte. That's a record amount of Americans on the sidelines, for as long as the consulting firm has been keeping track.
Deloitte found high-income households will spend five-times that of lower-income households this holiday season. The consulting firm polled 4,315 consumers about their holiday shopping plans between Sept. 7 and Sept. 14.
"This tale of two holidays is a pretty good reflection of the tale of two pandemics, right?," said Stephen Rogers, executive director of Deloitte's consumer industry division. "What starts off as a health crisis turns into a financial crisis if you're in the lower-income [bracket]."
Live look at the Biden administration's Spirit of Christmas index, hovering right around a dismal 30%:
The claim that the pandemic has wreaked a "financial crisis" on lower-income brackets, leading to reduced Christmas spending, might hold more water if the share of Americans sitting out the holiday wasn't more than double the rate of last year:
If "the pandemic" were responsible for those numbers, why weren't they much higher than 11.5% last season? Last year, after all, there were—at the very least—no vaccines, and the unemployment rate in December of 2020 was notably higher than it is now.
