Quote from Savant:
No, I'm not a teenager, but I do live in the USA. Do you? I don't know what reason there is to take your statement as any thing but literal. You said most Americans own a used car and clothes on their back. You didn't say they "kind of" or "about" or anything else that would imply you aren't being literal. Why are you being so defensive. It just appears as if you're out of touch with the reality of American life.
Apparently either you don't live here or you live where everyone has new cars and a nice house.
Used car sales are higher than new car sales. See this:
http://www.nada.org/NR/rdonlyres/FD...7/0/NADA_DATA_2007_UsedVehicle_Department.pdf
According to this document, dealers sold 19 million used cars, 11 or 12 million themselves, and the rest they wholesaled out, which means they sold it to used car dealers mostly, probably. Either way, that's well more than new cars by a pretty decent margin.
As for what people own, it follows the old 80/20 rule, except as of now
it's more like 85/15: the top 20% have 85% of the net worth, with the remaining 80% dividing up the remaining 15% of net worth.
So yes, used cars and some clothes is about typical.
Of course, in the rest of the world the majority gets by on less than 2 bucks a day, so you know, we are doing a bit better than that.