Affluent Americans are driving US economy and likely delaying need for Fed rate cuts

abcnews.go.com:

Older Americans are fueling a sustained boost to the U.S. economy

WASHINGTON — Since retiring two years ago, Joan Harris has upped her travel game.

Once or twice a year, she visits her two adult children in different states. She's planning multiple other trips, including to a science fiction convention in Scotland and a Disney cruise soon after that, along with a trip next year to neolithic sites in Great Britain.

“I really have more money to spend now than when I was working,” said Harris, 64, an engineer who worked 29 years for the federal government and lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Back then, she and her now-ex-husband were paying for their children's college educations and piling money into savings accounts. Now, she's splurging a bit and, for the first time, is willing to pay for first-class plane tickets. She plans to fly business class to Scotland and has arranged for a higher-level suite on the cruise.

“I suddenly realized, with my dad getting old and my mom dying, it’s like, ‘No, you can’t take it with you,’ ” she said. “I could become incapacitated to the point where I couldn’t enjoy something like going to Scotland or going on a cruise. So I better do it, right?”

Older Americans like Harris are fueling a sustained boost to the U.S. economy. Benefiting from outsize gains in the stock and housing markets over the past several years, they are accounting for a larger share of consumer spending — the principal driver of economic growth — than ever before.

And much of their spending is going toward higher-priced services like travel, health care and entertainment, putting further upward pressure on those prices — and on inflation. Such spending is relatively immune to the Federal Reserve's push to slow