Where is the One Percent?
thekeesh.com
thekeesh.com
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.
$85,000 in San Francisco will not get you much. The same amount in Kansas will have you living like a king.
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.
Seriously, I think the 1% should include only those earning over 500K a year (there's about... oh 1% of them in the world :-))...
99% = $515k taxable household income, which I believe includes capital gains.
It's a hard L-shaped graph though, the difference between 30 and 40% is under $10k, but the real jumps don't come until the mid 90% range.
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.
A lower capital gains only helps you if you are building to flip.
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.
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...
Where would the 1% be then? How many of us would be in the 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.
Note: Population data pulled from Mathematica and US Household income data pulled from wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_...). Note that the income data is dated, so corrections are welcome.
This is great, thanks. What technology did you use for the map and parsing the census data?
UPDATE: Looks like this js library was used http://mbostock.github.com/d3/ex/choropleth.html
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 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.
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.
This map isn't useless, but I think the title is highly misleading.