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 ...
You forgot to add in the number of people who do not file. Those are filer stats. About 40% of people do not file.
This data comes from the CBO, not the IRS.
The CBO does not specifically say that they included or excluded people that didn't file. But remember that the root data is for HOUSEHOLDS, not people.
The complete footnotes:
Average tax rates are calculated by dividing taxes by comprehensive household income.
Comprehensive household income equals pretax cash income plus income from other sources. Pretax cash income is the sum of wages, salaries, self-employment income, rents, taxable and nontaxable interest, dividends, realized capital gains, cash transfer payments, and retirement benefits plus taxes paid by businesses (corporate income taxes and the employer's share of Social Security, Medicare, and federal unemployment insurance payroll taxes) and employees' contributions to 401(k) retirement plans. Other sources of income include all in-kind benefits (Medicare, Medicaid, employer-paid health insurance premiums, food stamps, school lunches and breakfasts, housing assistance, and energy assistance).
Income categories are defined by ranking all people by their comprehensive household income adjusted for household size—that is, divided by the square root of the household’s size. (A household consists of the people who share a housing unit, regardless of their relationships.) Quintiles, or fifths, contain equal numbers of people. Households with negative income (business or investment losses larger than other income) are excluded from the lowest income category but are included in totals.
Individual income taxes are attributed directly to households paying those taxes. Social insurance, or payroll, taxes are attributed to households paying those taxes directly or paying them indirectly through their employers. Corporate income taxes are attributed to households according to their share of capital income. Federal excise taxes are attributed to them according to their consumption of the taxed good or service.
The minimum adjusted income is the lower income boundary for each quintile. Because incomes are adjusted by dividing income by the square root of household size, an adjusted income range implies different unadjusted income for different size households. To compute the unadjusted income range for a particular size household, the adjusted income must be multiplied by the square root of the household size: 1.414 for a two-person household, 1.732 for a three-person household; 2.0 for a four-person household, 2.236 for a five-person household. For example, in 2007, the highest quintile had adjusted income above $74,700. A two-person household would need income above $105,600 to fall in that quintile, while a four-person household would need income in excess of $149,400.
my gross income last year was around $220,000 which looks like it would make me richer than 97-98% of all Americans..
wow
there could be a HUGE difference in adjusted income and gross income.
my gross income last year was around $220,000 but my adjusted gross was only $120,000...
maybe a misstatement, he meant top 50% when he said top 10%.
I believe Rush is wrong on this. The top 10% earn closer to $120,000 or more.
Thanks for the link. The data the CBO uses appears to come from the IRS but they may have other data to average it out to everyone.
Didn’t even catch that. You are right. My gross income was high in 2008 because of stock gains, but they had a cost basis which adjusted the net way down. Not sure how many households factor it in.
Taking just the 5 median bracket the average is around $35,000 per household. The top 10% based on the CBO data linked to above is $102,000 but that includes some 2 income households - and even among the 2 income households one usually makes more than the other which also skews the average individual income if you try to use that data to calculate it.
See the corrected version in post 24. Just as soon as I hit “post” I realized I had left something out of the last sentence in post 23.
Statistics can be funny things. It’s reported that Steve Jobs took a salary of $1 a year which would put him in the bottom 1%, right?
In this case, the CBO's "minimum adjusted income" in this case doesn't directly equate to the IRS's "adjusted gross income". The "adjustments" are completely different.
If the statistics are from the CBO, it's inclusive of all income, regardless of source.
Rush is an idiot when it comes to math and numbers. You can’t trust a thing he says when he starts talking about percents and averages and numbers in general.
seriously. it is truly embarrassing.
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