Agreed, I thought the same thing. It seems kind of strange to use median income to find the "1%".
I guess it all depends on the point this is trying to make, which I'm a little unclear on. It seems perhaps useful (it's data, after all), but if the intent was to tie it to the "occupy" movement, then I missed that connection.
Yea but living in San Francisco will get you lots of culture, restaurants, etc. that you won't get in Kansas. Living in SF is just a luxury that some people are willing to pay for, you could live in Oakland and pay half the rent.
I'm not knocking on SF, I live there and I love it. I'm just pointing out that this "top 1%" article is useless since it does not account for cost of living.
The difference in CoL is so drastic between NYC/SF and Kansas that the study might look drastically different if it looked at net income after living expenses.
Not get you much? Perhaps that's true if you're supporting a family of four with only your income, but if you're single, 85k is pretty darn decent. Granted. I don't know if you can find an apartment in SF right now regardless of how much money you've got.
Was that within the last 4 months? I moved out this July and pretty much had to find a place within 3 or 4 days. In 2 days, I found a room (granted, far away from downtown and in a house full of random people) for $900 a month. I was a bit disappointed with my place, but in the following month or two I saw the housing market go crazy again, and to this day I hear it's difficult to find a place even if you can afford the offerings, simply because there's huge lines at every open house.
According to the Wiki, 40% of the US population made over $54k in 2003. That's 125 million people or 1.8% of the world's population. Since there are obviously people outside the US also making over $54k per year, we can assume that at least 2% of the world population is making over 54k.
No. You need $380,000 in income, i.e., PROFIT, from a small business to be considered part of the 1%.
A "successful" small business owner could take in $2-3M in receipts and still only clear $150k a year after expenses. Or less. Some businesses don't have much of a margin. And most don't have more than a few hundred k a year of receipts.
That's what I find crazy about all of the "you'll hurt small business!" anti-tax rhetoric. If it's only targeting more than $380k in PROFIT (for a sole proprietorship, or that much per owner for a partnership/jointly owned business), then raising the MARGINAL tax to 50% or higher would only encourage the business owner(s) to spend the money on expanding their business instead of buying a second yacht.
That's exactly what I meant - most small business owners don't generate more than $500K (or even $380K), therefore they're not the 1%.
And I agree that raising the tax for large companies that do have those kinds of payouts to their executives and employees would make them reinvest into the business to avoid paying said tax in full, which is still better than them taking it home. But then again, there will always be a way to evade that, especially when you've got millions of dollars on the line...
Yeah, I see something similar about the capital gains debate. You only pay capital gains when you /sell/ your business. If you want to take money out of an existing business, you have two options; issue a dividend (and pay both corporate taxes /and/ capital gains taxes, which usually makes the second option attractive) or pay yourself bonus/salary at the usual tax rates.
A lower capital gains only helps you if you are building to flip.
>issue a dividend (and pay both corporate taxes /and/ capital gains taxes
This is only true if you're a C-corp. I know on HN most folks are creating a C-corp because it's easier to invest in, but if you're doing a small business, a partnership, S-corp, or LLC filing as an S-corp are likely the best options for you.
In all three of the latter cases, taking money out only causes you to be taxed once.
right, I'm an S corp. you get taxed once, but you pay the income tax rate, as if it were salary or bonus, so you still end up paying well north of twice the capital gains rate.
depends a lot on if you count capital gains. My understanding is that if you include those, (which really, you'd have to; most really wealthy people earn most of their money through capital gains rather than salary) you have to be well north of a million a year to be in the top 1%.
The top 1% of the wold is ~70 million people. This is 22% of the US population. The top 22% in the US earn about $85k per year. So, if you're making over $85k, you're in the global 1%.
Except, this is rather America centric. If we expand out to the entire G8 (pop. ~880 million), we find that you need to be in the top 8% of G8 salaries to be in the global 1%. This corresponds to about $150k, taking the zeroth order approximation that the G8 distributions are the same as the US one.
The idea that Caroline County, VA (my home town) is the 9% is fairly ridiculous. It's a very poor county, with most people working in the food industry or at King's Dominion nearby. I suppose DC commuters may be skewing the stats, but that certainly wasn't reflected in my high school.
Not surprised about Virginia, which is where I live. 3 of the top 5 richest counties in the US are in Virginia. If you count Maryland, then 4 of the top 5 are in the DC metro area.
I think Occupy refers to the claim that "the top 1 percent owns more financial wealth than bottom 95 percent combined" popularized by Michael Moore in his latest film.
Personally I'm not a huge fan of so-called "cost of living" adjustments. I've lived in a range of "cost of living" areas, and areas with a higher CoL are generally nicer, by which I mean, everything in the area is just generally nicer. Stores don't have missing tiles, produce is fresher, crime is lower, the lights on the stores outside don't have missing bulbs for long, the roads are smoother, the houses are nicer, and the local culture is richer, in most senses of the term.
If we're talking about things like global levels of true wealth, you probably shouldn't adjust for CoL. Areas with high CoL are areas with a higher ambient wealth, and for questions of who is better off, trying to normalize on CoL lines someone in semi-rural China vs. a Manhattenite is normalizing away a critical truth.
I find this especially true in labor markets. I've moved from the central valley to the silicon valley and back several times during my life, and yeah, silicon valley has higher wages (and higher rents) - but you know what? it also has higher expectations.
I noticed that whenever I went to silicon valley, I was, well, mediocre. I had to put some effort in just to stay in the middle of the pack, and I've had some jobs where it took my all just to keep my head above water. In the central valley? almost everywhere I worked, I was like a little god, even without all that much effort.
Sure, the average worker gets paid more here in silicon valley; but if you hire the average silicon valley sysadmin/programmer, you are getting a whole lot more than the average central valley sysadmin/programmer.
Agreed - that would be interesting to see cost of living weighed in. Speaking from experience, Suffolk/Nassau counties in NY may have higher salaries - but the cost of living is rough (e.g. property taxes).
Seems they're concentrated in Washington DC primarily, with New York, San Francisco, Boston and Seattle taking the rear.
The North Slope of alaska, however, shows an error here. The cost of living in Barrow is really very high... much higher than, say, Adams County, Washington. So, I suspect someone making the median income in Adams County is probably doing better than someone making the median in Barrow, in terms of take home pay....
Though, interestingly, those oil workers will be taxed on their income, not accounting for their expenses, and thus are marginally poorer as a result.
Also, according to the standards of this map, I'm the %1. This is good to know, because previously, I'd felt a little sheepish when I made that claim.
It seems like having the center of political power inhabited by the 1% explains why the concerns of the 99% are so easily dismissed by national politicans.
What are the standards for this map? It seems it is the 1% richest counties by median (household?) income. So I don't think you can qualify yourself as 1% based on this, all you could say is you live in a rich county.
Yeah, this is measuring something quite different: the areas where the average person is the wealthiest, rather than where the much-wealthier-than-average people live (though there is probably a correlation). The cutoff for being in the top 1% of household incomes is $380k or so. It would be interesting to see the distribution of where such people live.
This map isn't useless, but I think the title is highly misleading.
Looks like median household income, what's most interesting is when you look at the bottom 0-10% bracket they are mostly in red states except for West Virginia.
