Posted on 05/04/2014 5:26:44 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
The "1 percent" and the "99 percent" have become household phrases in the last few years. But in the course of moving discussions of income distribution percentiles beyond economic text books and in to the popular discourse of sound bites and protest signs, the nuances can get lost. Which brings us to some interesting new research about the 1 percent, discussed in a recent book called “Chasing the American Dream.”
Back when the Occupy Wall Street movement was fond of chanting “We are the 99 percent” the book’s co-author, Mark Rank, got curious about some of the assumptions buried in that chant. Who exactly is the 99 percent? What’s their relationship to that remaining, increasingly notorious 1 percent?
The whole debate struck Rank as very us versus them. “There’s this image out there that those two groups do not cross over — that they're static groups,” he says.
Rank is a professor of social welfare at Washington University, and so he had the tools to see if this static image of the 1 percent versus everyone else was true. He and his co-author, Thomas Hirschl of Cornell, combed through four decades of survey data that followed the lives of thousands of Americans to see how much money they made each year. And what they found surprised them.
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
Surely not as much as before as real incomes have dropped...that’s the thing...not as much as before, target the 1%...repeat until all are equally miserable and blaming everyone else until 0bummer keeps all the wealth with S0r0s and Gates and Buffet and other billionaire commies so they can control everything...
article says $340,000
Bump
The thing that stands out to me from the chart is that the one percent threshold is decreasing even in what appear to be non inflation adjusted amounts. Our nation is very sick financially.
Plus, the “1%” does not have static membership. People move in and out of it all the time. That’s the beauty of a free society.
I disagree. I think what it shows is that all the “activists” screaming about the inequitable distribution of income, and how the “rich are getting richer” have it all wrong. Based on this data, income is more equitably distributed now than it was 40 years ago.
“The 1%” are the scapegoats for the .0001% who are the real problem, but as major political contributors will always remain untouchable.
Excellent post!
300 thousand a year is comfortable in most locales.
300 million a year is a Democrat crony capitalist.
- I am working on it -
Income is not the same as wealth.
So Senator Elizabeth Warren, “I created much of the intellectual foundation for what [the Occupy Movement] does” is a 1%er with her 350,000 Harvard salary and 8 million dollar house in Cambridge?
Income is one thing; as the chart shows, income can vary significantly from year to year, especially in the high brackets. Wealth is another. How stable is the top 1% of wealth?
The 2 Percent!
“If [Elena] Kagan [President Obama’s nominee to the Supreme Court] is confirmed, Jews, who represent less than 2 percent of the U.S. population, will have 33 percent of the Supreme Court seats. Is this Democrats’ idea of diversity?” — Pat Buchanan
“If you want to know ethnicity and power in the United States Senate, 13 members of the Senate are Jewish folks who are from 2 percent of the population. That is where real power is...” — Pat Buchanan
Rank is a professor of social welfare at Washington University, and so he had the tools to see if this static image of the 1 percent versus everyone else was true. He and his co-author, Thomas Hirschl of Cornell, combed through four decades of survey data that followed the lives of thousands of Americans to see how much money they made each year. And what they found surprised them.The suspense-builder is the most intriguing form of FR excerpt. ;')
Big take-away - it’s a moving target - few people get to the top 1% and stay there for the rest of their lives......
That can’t be extrapolated from this data. For example, maybe it’s a ten percent drop in income for the people in the top 1% of income earners, but maybe for the rest, it’s a twenty percent drop. Of course for many more in the past two or three years than in the past fifty years, it’s been a 100% drop in income.
300 million is not quite the same in Manhattan NY and Manhattan Ks.
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