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The mean income of the top 5 percent of households in Manhattan soared 9 percent in 2013 over 2012, giving Manhattan the biggest dollar income gap of any county in the country, according to data from the Census Bureau.
The top 5 percent of households earned $864,394 and 88 times as much as the poorest 20 percent
Why would it not be? Manhattan has a large amount of high earners as many high paying jobs / industries are located here. Also, it is home to the most amount of billionaires in the Americas (maybe the world??) I believe. That greatly inflates the high income averages. And the city encourages some of the worlds poorest, most uneducated people to come here in mass numbers. It has policies that draw the poorest people from elsewhere in the country here. So why would there not be a huge gap?
You close a gap by bringing up the bottom, not bringing down the top. That is impossible when policies are in place ensuring there is an overabundance of poorly educated, non skilled workers.
Another alarmist article without explanation. Earth to the NY Times: Of course it does.
Notice New York (and San Francisco) are the only urban counties on that list. Those other counties are homogenously upper-middle class and wealthy counties without the mix of people you'd find in cities (poor, students, working class), so they don't have much of lower end, thus they can't have extreme gaps like Manhattan.
Manhattan also has the most rich and super rich people of any city in the world, which creates large swings in the data and pushes it upwards. It's just astonishing that Manhattan still manages to be #1 in average even with the 200,000 poor/working class/public housing dwellers on the northern end of the island, plus students who earn nothing and drag the average down tremendously. If you removed those people and made Manhattan a homogenous county like the rest, the top 5% is probably closer to $2 million.
keep in mind that info is not part of a regular census that every one gets so you know it is at least accurate.
the financial info is from a few random samples of a questionnaire that very few citizens get that is sent out by the acs .
there are nooooooop financial questions that are part of the actual census.
if most of us guessed at the finances of even the people in our own neighborhood by using 1 or 2 cases we would likely be wrong especially if it isn't a lower income area..
I thought we all had made the collective decision that huge income disparities don't matter and that it would be best to let the middle class go , so the rich can have it all. We keep voting for that anyway so I just assume that's what we want.
we were able to call up via our fidelity account every dollar we spent the last year all sorted automatically by classification.
it was an amazing eye opener to just what it cost to live here .
we had 700 bucks in just tolls to see the kids. our food bill for two of us was 14k . that does not include another 7k or so we spend eating out every week or taking the kids and grand kids out to eat.
parking meters got over 250 bucks just going to the gym.
the list of expenses went on and on. you look at food bills outside of ny and they are a fraction of what we spend . insurances are so much more.
a plan f medigap plan is 3200 here , it is almost 1/2 that in georgia.
Why would it not be? Manhattan has a large amount of high earners as many high paying jobs / industries are located here. Also, it is home to the most amount of billionaires in the Americas (maybe the world??) I believe. That greatly inflates the high income averages. And the city encourages some of the worlds poorest, most uneducated people to come here in mass numbers. It has policies that draw the poorest people from elsewhere in the country here. So why would there not be a huge gap?
You close a gap by bringing up the bottom, not bringing down the top. That is impossible when policies are in place ensuring there is an overabundance of poorly educated, non skilled workers.
The fastest way to close a gap would be to work on both sides simultaneously.
there are nooooooop financial questions that are part of the actual census.
Yeah, there are.
The "long form" is quite intrusive and they want to know EVERYTHING. If I recall from a month or so as a census enumerator back in 2000, there was one long form with hundreds of questions randomly assigned for every 14 short forms. (Don't hold me to that exact number though...it was 15 years ago,)
I had to quit after doing all my assigned short forms because I could not bring myself to try to grille someone so unmercifully on every aspect of life so I gave my long forms back.
I wish I had kept one of the forms.
I mean, really, they wanted to know how many miles each member drove to church...not kidding. As for finances, it's how much do you have, how much do you make, how much is your house worth, how much is your mortgage, your rent, your kids' schooling costs, number of cars, distance driven each year, number of jobs in the last 10 years.
They MAY have even asked how often you have sex.
Anyone unlucky enough to have drawn one of these hateful forms can back me up.
Gap Between Manhattan’s Rich and Poor Is Greatest in U.S., Census Finds
I see no reason on Earth to doubt that finding.
Last edited by Kefir King; 04-12-2015 at 08:11 AM..
nope , the census we all get has zero financial information . the financial portion is called the acs or american consumer survey.
that asks all those finanial quetions but country wide a very limited number of them are sent out and many folks don't even respond as it is not mandatory you do.
The fastest way to close a gap would be to work on both sides simultaneously.
nyc attracts many low income folks for all the perks we offer.
public transportation
lots of unskilled jobs
welfare programs
lots of ethnic neighborhoods
low income housing and programs.
it also atttracts the rich.
look at new yorks rising exemptions for estate taxes. we went to 3 million this year and are headed to 5 million in two years.
that is a great deal for the wealthy who don't want to live in some no estate tax place.
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