dstark

Powersim Wealth Ranking

2007 numbers.... must be lower now

Wealthiest US Person 58,323,058,000
100th Wealthiest 2,825,118,000
400th Wealthiest 1,011,296,000
Top 0.1% 53,443,000
1% 6,377,000
5% 1,588,000
10% 951,000
20% 475,000
33% 263,000
50% 110,000
77.1% 100,000
60% 58,000
70% 29,000
80% 10,000
90% 3,000
100% -1,000,000

dstark

income ranking 2007 numbers

Current Income Ranking

0.1% 1,928,407
1% 402,473
5% 200,093
10% 133,189
15% 113,053
20% 98,351
25% 91,001
30% 73,431
40% 55,455
300000% 50,000
50% 46,453
60% 33,861
70% 27,559
80% 17,074
90% 11,820
100% 0

Mr Payne

Is that by filer?

dstark

US households...........

Mr Payne

No big surprises. What's the problem?

LogicWarrior

wow, top 1% has more than the bottom 20% combined.

how exactly are the bottom 20% (assuming this is working americans) leeches and the top 1% aren't? they don't exactly do the work of 20 people.

zotan

Emmanuel Saez at Berkeley is the foremost expert on wealth distribution in America. He has gone back to the start of the 20th century, and compiled the most comprehensive data on the distribution of wealth that we have by looking at income tax returns along with other data.

Emmanuel Saez's Home Page

What's worrisome about the distribution of wealth is the rise in inequality that we have seen since the late 1970's. Emmanuel Saez describe that in this paper:

http://www.econ.berkeley.edu/~saez/s...s-2006prel.pdf

Essentially, the United States was incredibly unequal before the Great Depression. There were a few wealthy people who controlled massive amounts of the money, and the rest of the country was just getting by. The Great Depression came along, and the wealth of the richest few was destroyed by the crash in the stock market and the decline in industrial output. World War II further eroded their wealth, due to the high taxes and high wages established by FDR. These high wages, along with the high demand for labor, elevated the poor to an essentially middle class status. Economists refer to this period as the Great Compression, as the income distribution was compressed which more or less created the middle class in a very short period of time. This egalitarian society persisted until about the 1970's, when income inequality started to rise again. Today, the country is about as unequal as it was on the eve of the Great Depression.

Without going to far into specifics, the lack of income equality is detrimental to economic growth. The marginal propensity to consume is much higher for the not so wealthy, and having them control a greater share of the national income leads to higher rates of consumption and thus higher rates of economic growth.

Mr Payne

Are you kidding? The bottom 20% has low IQ, high criminality, high illegitimacy, poor health, etc. They cost more money than they put in (ie: the help from the government is higher than the taxes they pay, which are virtually nothing).

LogicWarrior

they contribute to the economy by working, we're not a centrally-planned economy

Mr Payne

I never said they didn't contribute to the economy.

LogicWarrior

Right, and without the help we give them, like education, police, and Medicaid, they'd contribute less.

Mr Payne

I don't disagree with that. I was merely noting that the top 1% is far better than the bottom 20%.

LogicWarrior

Better for tax revenue.

barrons

While consumption is nice we also need investment capital and risk accepting investors to grow that economy in basic ways. Bill Gates got a start because his parents had some money to risk as did their friends. How many jobs did he create? Was his wealth not earned?

kluge

Paris Hilton and Leona Helmsley's dog are both in the top 1%. So was Bernie Madoff.

Just an observation.

Basically, roughly zero. Bill Gates did not invent anything. He didn't even write the code he got rich off of. His contribution to society was to operate a successful monopoly. If he hadn't done it, the same technology would have developed in other ways, with the same number of people developing and managing it. You can make a good case for the argument that Bill Gates has personally retarded the development of wide-scale IT in America rather than assisting it.