Who are the top 1% income earners in the US (user search)
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  Who are the top 1% income earners in the US (search mode)
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Author Topic: Who are the top 1% income earners in the US  (Read 15705 times)
angus
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« on: October 06, 2010, 07:41:03 PM »

I'd be interested to see how much of it comes from ownership of companies, and how much from Wall Street deal making.

Looking to make a little scratch working from home, are you?

According to the IRS data, the top one percent (AGI above approx. 400K per year), earns about 23% of the aggregate.  Apparently the peak was in 1928, when the top 1% earned about 24% of the income, then fell off gradually till about 1980 to about 9%, then began to rise, topping 20% by around 2007.  Note that the top 1% also pay about 37% of the taxes.

Wall Street tycoons are the richest of the rich, for your list.  More than a hundred of the richest 400 gringos are in finance or investments, according to Forbes.  And 25 top hedge-fund managers got an average of $1 billion each.  Most of the rest are either Chief executives of successful companies or they got their money the old-fashioned way.

Ain't but one way to be super-rich, hoss.  Or stay super-rich if you got it the old-fashioned way.  You got to get yerself a new god.  Eisner, Walton, Morgan, Rockefeller, Gates, and all the rest are probably hard workers, but then so are you.  And so am I.  Well, maybe they're smart.  But then so are you.  And so am I.  What we don't have is a deep, profound worship of the almighty dollar.  I think you can't fake that or force that.

"Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need, but not every man’s greed."
— Mohandas K. Gandhi
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angus
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« Reply #1 on: October 07, 2010, 08:37:05 AM »

Wealth comes mostly from two sources in Western countries - either being very good at something people are willing to pay for or by working hard at becoming wealthy. Investment bankers are in the latter group. I'd argue that someone like Bill Gates or Tiger Woods are in the first.

Almost a perfect restatement of what I posted, but not quite.  (Replace "something" with "acquiring wealth" and you're spot-on.  Every one I know is very good at something, but few are super-rich.)  And according to Forbes, about a third are in the latter group.  The actual IRS data takes more digging.  I was able to quickly come up with dollar-figure delineators for brackets, and some other data, through their website, but the exact number of investment bankers, country music singers, all-star hitters, lottery winners, and chief executive officers doesn't appear on the IRS web page in an obvious way.  It may be there somewhere, but patient linking is not one of those things I'm very good at.

Of course, you can also inherit, so that would be a 3rd.

Of course.  We call that "acquiring wealth the old-fashioned way."
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angus
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« Reply #2 on: October 07, 2010, 11:56:02 AM »

We're almost in agreement but not quite.

You seem to negate the group of people that are wealthy due to ability. I don't really think Bill Gates was mostly in it for the money, for instance. And the same goes for all those sportsmen, inventors, artists etc.

I thought you were going a bit too far in thinking that those people only differ from you and me in that they want money more. I don't think I have the kind of talent to become that rich, anyway. In a manner of speaking I might think that I'm as smart as some of those people but not in a way that would yield me as much money.

I'm not saying you can dance like Michael Jackson, or play like Liberace, or steal you ex-roommates ideas like Bill Gates, but there's something you can do very well.  Maybe it's marbles, or jacks, or hop-scotch, or impressions of Richard Nixon, or maybe you can drink every one under the table, but there's probably at least one thing you can do extremely well, maybe better than anyone else in Sweden.  Maybe these aren't marketable skills.  Or maybe you just haven't thought about how to go about marketing them, or even whether they're marketable skills, because you don't have that drive to be rich.  Maybe you're the best card player on the block, but you only play for pennies.  And that's okay.  I don't have that rich man's drive, either.  

Well, anyway, I thought it was an interesting question.  I hadn't thought of it before, but once asked, I too was curious.  So I spent about 20 minutes googling, and what I could find was that it's easy to get the number of rich people (define as 1% or .1% or .01% if you prefer, it's all available from the IRS), and their mean income, and the income cut-off levels that define those groups, and the total amount of taxes that they pay, and the percent they pay, etc.  But it's hard to actually find out exactly how many are bankers, or artists, or whatever.  Maybe it's a privacy thing, but more likely I just gave up because I'm lazy, or didn't really care to know that much.  But I did find a couple of articles from fairly reputable sources making claims.  And from those claims it seems that about a third fall into one category (110+25 out of 400 from a Forbes article of the 400 richest Americans).  I admit my statement about the remainder was ambiguous, and I still don't know about the other 2/3, but I'd imagine that a good many were the type that came into their money the old fashioned way.  But it does take some skill to retain that wealth, once acquired, and, I'd guess, it takes some love of money.  A great deal, in fact.  But you're right, that analysis is just based on my presuppositions and I have no objective way to back it up.  Just a strong hunch.

Here's an interesting, but off-topic, set of data from Forbes in tabular form:

country              percent of wealth owned
                         by top 10% of earners

Switzerland                71.3%                        
United States                69.8%                        
Denmark                        65.0%
France                        61.0%                          
Sweden                        58.6%                        
UK                                56.0%
Canada                        53.0%
Norway                        50.5%                          
Germany                        44.4%                            
Finland                        42.3%

I was looking for some trend to pair it with, such as highest individual rate or percent of workers who are government employees, but I haven't found any monotonically increasing or decreasing numbers to pair with these yet.  
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