Posted on 10/28/2011 12:18:02 PM PDT by NicoleGTalum
Rush: Do you know what it takes to be in the top 1%? Take a stab. What is it? Top 10%: $50,000 a year or more you are in the top 10% of wage earners. Take a stab at the floor, the minimum income that qualifies to be in the top 1%. Brian, what do you think it is? (interruption) You're close. He said, "$500,000." It's $343,000 a year. If you make $343,000 a year, you are in the top 1%.
(Excerpt) Read more at rushlimbaugh.com ...
“WHERE ARE THE STATISTICS TO BACK THIS UP?????”
here you go......
Bump
How does this support Rush’s claim?
Rush is stating that anyone making $50,000 a year (and more) is in the top ten percent of wage earners. How is that possible?
That link shows how wrong Rush is.
That’s for sure! I just cannot believe he would make such a HUGE statement like this if he didn’t have stats to back it up - this is causing lots of confusion!
Total income, adjusted gross income, capital gains income included or not, wage-earner or household income, etc.
The numbers don’t mean anything until somebody defines what is meant by “income.”
Ok, another quote from Rush Today: they point out in the story that this is more than the average United States salary. Do you know that if you earn $50,000 a year or more, you are in the upper 10% of wage earners in America? I love telling people that statistic. They don’t believe it, and it sort of puts this...
He doesn’t give you anything else to go on (WTF?)
There are three kinds of ‘average’, Mean (arithmetical average), Median (midpoint of the distribution of the population) and Mode (most frequently occurring value).
$50,000 by any reasonable reading would seem to me a halfway mark, the middle, half above, half below.
The article Rush is referencing is about college tuition and how it averages $50,000 in many cases - but how the National Average WAGE is $42,000. So, we are dealing with the term “national average wage”. ?
I am not supporting rush one way or the other.
I don’t listen, have work to do.
But to answer the questions about salaries by percentage,
here’s another listing:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affluence_in_the_United_States#Top_percentiles
So you are saying he is basing that stat on the total number of taxpayers?
acording to national taxpayers union website the threshold fo 1% is $343,927, 5% is $154,643, 10% is $112,124. these are 2009 numbers.
bottom 50% eran less than $33,000.
Be careful of the terminology. The top 10% of income earners is not the same as the top 10% of wage earners.
I heard that too. If that’s the case, I am in the top 10% too. I don’t believe it one bit.
I finally remembered you from some time ago. You hadn’t posted in over three years.
I have no idea where Rush got this data, but it might be taxable income. Most people making $50k don’t make anywhere near 50k taxable. You have off the top deduction, then kids, then perhaps mortgage etc.
Yes. So how could Rush’s statement be correct?
Yes, it’s been awhile ;) This comment from Rush had me so flustered I had to turn to FR!
50,000 as taxable income would definitely help the argument, but still seems like it would fall short (?).
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