> Economic illiteracy

I respect your opinion but the stats presented before does not “shows“ illiteracy but low investments. Lack of liquidity to invest seems a very plausible raison because a revenu threshold has to be passed to be able to buy food before founds. This stat is probably almost a proxy for how many Americans are below that threshold.

It is really hard to believe that 71.93% of Americans are on the verge of homelessness and starvation. Much more plausible (and even mentioned in the linked article under "Lack of budgeting and financial planning" and "Social pressures") are just bad habits.

Of course there are economic literate people who really are struggling, but I doubt they make even half of those 71.93%.

In this case you are revealing your own (statistical) illiteracy. It’s referring to 70% of people who claim to be living paycheck to paycheck, not 70% of all people.

There’s a range of goods and services accessible on may consider after food but before investments : medical expenses, gas to visit family on week end…

The personal savings rate has slowly halved over the past 60 years[0].

Did everyone become illiterate or maybe the inflation rate has exceeded the growth rate of wages[1], among other things?

What's funny is that on two comments rejecting my argument one accuses me of considering people "too dumb" to take their own financial decisions, the other tells me people are actually too dumb and that's why they are in financial trouble.

- [0]: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/personal-savings

- [1]: https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/

The article you linked mentions "Lack of budgeting and financial planning" and "Social pressures" for reason of living paycheck to paycheck. And those are self reported values.

Last 60 years we experienced enormous growth of advertising - is it really hard to believe that many people are having big problems with limiting their spending.