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Based on the Internal Revenue Service’s 2010 database below, here’s how much the top Americans make: Top 1%: $380,354 Top 5%: $159,619 Top 10%: $113,799 Top 25%: $67,280 Top 50%: >$33,048
Attempting to measuring the top 1% by annual income is pointless. What truly puts you in the top 1% is net worth, and AFAIK the IRS doesn't measure net worth.
Yeah, I have been the top 1% many times in my life (and apparently, much more than that) - and somehow, I don't have billions laying around the house...
Somehow, I have a feeling that using annual income is a fairly poor measure of the "1%."
well tell that to the OWS who measure the 1% as not only being rich....but being the highest earners.
Whose taxes do you think they are demanding to be raised? duh...
i'm with you on that 100%. Democrats' $250k/year proposals are poorly thought out. Increases on wages is stupid. The aspects of the tax code that have been hollowed out the most over the years are corporate income taxes and capital gains taxes. Go look at a 50-year chart of corporate vs. personal taxes, and you will see what i am talking about.
Cain and Huntsman , among others, are correct that we need to scrap the existing tax code. Payroll tax is regressive, lets high-income people opt most income out of having to fund the welfare state. I also think it is important for effective corporate income rates to be at least as high as personal income, and for capital gains/dividends/hedge fund manager income to be taxed at least the same rate as wages.
Last edited by Cletus Awreetus-Awrightus; 10-13-2011 at 04:22 PM..
Just to show how screwed up the system is, I have a family member with a net worth over 1 million dollars and no debt whatsoever who legally qualified for and took Earned Income Credit, thanks to (assumed) losses in value for his business that he did not feel in real life.
It's a good thing those monkeys typing zeros into the computer are so efficient...
Attempting to measuring the top 1% by annual income is pointless. What truly puts you in the top 1% is net worth, and AFAIK the IRS doesn't measure net worth.
True.
My father, for the one year before he was forced to retire with major health problems, was in the top 1% of earners, due to a short-term explosion of the product he was a salesman of (naturally, the commission structure was immediately changed by the company so they could keep all the benefits for themselves). It was not taken into account that his entire life he had made poverty-level wages, and that he had a kid not yet in college, and that he had no pension but had to support himself and his stay-at-home wife for the next 25 years on savings alone. It was also during the period when those with decent incomes were INCREDIBLY highly taxed. Consequently, he lost most of his income that year to taxes. During that "high income" year, as well as all the other very low income years, my family lived as poorly as it is possible to live.
It was absolutely WRONG of the government to confiscate that amount of money from someone who was never "rich" -- or even Middle Class -- and had to live and pay medical bills on a very small amount of life savings. And it didn't help at all that his family home soon started being taxed as if it were a mansion, based on the sales market, although he never got to benefit from that wealth and it was soon gone in the housing crash.
Sometimes it seems our government is intent that NOBODY will ever rise from the lowest levels of society due to their own hard work. Their wealth-equalization efforts definitely make working hard a losing proposition.
Flash forward to today, where my spouse and I, as two highly educated professionals in the most complex and technical industry on the planet, in their peak earning years, are not top 1%, but barely in the top 5%. Yet the situation is similar: we have no pensions, we pay pretty much for our own health care insurance, our health won't allow us to keep working 80-hour weeks much longer even if we needed to, we pay a fortune in property taxes for a house (actually two, thanks to my Dad passing away) that is not only unsellable at any price, but is bankrupting us.
In short, our current tax code is ridiculously unfair, and is doing a great job of making sure we are ALL poor, even if we have good jobs at the moment--as well as being so ridiculously complicated that you have to hire a tax expert to wade through the endless forms.
If I had ANY faith at all in Government, I'd support a national sales tax instead, or even the 9-9-9 plan of Cain. But if there is one thing I've learned over the years, is that ANY change in the current system WILL cost me money--usually quite a bit. Government will NEVER make a change without being able to rob the citizenry even more than they do now. Politicians have one agenda, and that is to make Big Government as large and as all-powerful as possible--thus making themselves as powerful as possible. Some rules have no exceptions, and this is one of them.
Based on the Internal Revenue Service’s 2010 database below, here’s how much the top Americans make: Top 1%: $380,354 Top 5%: $159,619 Top 10%: $113,799 Top 25%: $67,280 Top 50%: >$33,048
Pu-lease. The "99%" don't want to be bothered with F-A-C-T-S.
ETA: you found it to be surprising that the cut-off for 1% is upper-middle management or doctors/attorneys/professionals /small business owners and not Fortune 500 CEO's? Why? Did you really think there were 1.4 MILLION "Bank of America-type" CEO's in this country????
We should try to increase the number of 1%ers... wait we can't do that.
Okay, we can at least increase the average household income by calling apartments "big houses", and combining the incomes of everyone who lives there to make one big household income. Why should the fact that they have seperate kitchens keep them from being a house?
Dang, I've got a lot of good ideas today.
Somebody needs to be writing this stuff down.
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