Federal debt and 1 percent wealth

"For every buyer there must be a seller, and for every lender a borrower. One man's expenditure is another's receipt. My debts are your assets, my deficits your surplus ... In the United States today one budget which is usually left holding a deficit is that of the federal government. When no one else borrows the surpluses of the thrifty, the Treasury ends up doing so."

In 1963 James Tobin wrote "Deficit, Deficit, Who's Got the Deficit?" for The New Republic.
The original article is hard to find but a nice summary is here. I was made aware of the article by a Sidney Winter Twitter post.

Atif Mian, Ludwig Straub, and Amir Sufi's more recent "The Saving Glut of the Rich and the Rise in Household Debt" (MSS, 2020)* can be partly seen as an exposition and update of Tobin's point that "Of course, many private households have financial deficits. They pay out more than their incomes for food, clothing, cars, appliances, houses, taxes, etc. They draw on savings accounts, redeem savings bonds, sell securities, mortgage houses, or incur installment debt. but deficit households are far outweighed by surplus households." MSS conclude that the saving glut of the rich has been "linked to the substantial dissaving and large accumulation of debt by the non-rich" and has also "been financing government deficits to a greater degree."

I was curious about the link between the increases in the wealth of the top 1% and the federal debt. As expected they're correlated. In the chart below,  the wealth of the top 1% of the wealth distribution is on the left hand side, federal debt is rhs.

*MSS measure the contribution to aggregate savings from different parts of the income distribution. They use Piketty et al.'s "Distributional National Accounts" (2018), and they test their results using income shares from the Congressional Budget Office and wealth shares from the Federal Reserve's DFA, which show assets by wealth percentile group.